Rights, entitlements and the law. The ambiguous status of legal elements in economic discourse

Economics and law have a reciprocal attraction. The two disciplines are often complementary in business practice. Law is often a fundamental subject in business school, and some economics is taught in law schools to make students aware of both the context and some hard constraints to any legal discourse. In general, legal scholars would be happy to benefit from some solid economic input for their arguments. This actually happens for a variety of specific sub- jects. Unfortunately, delusions and misunderstandings are also frequent for a variety of reasons, primarily because economists sometimes supply judgments in fields usually reserved for legal disciplines and they do this by developing their own simplified legal categories functional to their method of analysis. However, adopting law categories in standard economics raises some serious methodologi- cal challenges. Rights and the law are ambiguous inputs for economic discourse and, therefore, are often best understood as simple constraints.