Latin American Legal Studies

Abstract

In Latin America, law and economics scholarship is gradually finding its way into court decisions and legislative enactments, both with respect to an increasing tendency to assess the overall consequences of legal rules, in terms of a growing application of cost-benefit analyses, and in the form of more incentives-driven reasoning. Until today, however, the literature on the movement’s normative foundations has failed to find common ground on how to justify its theoretical suppositions. This article illuminates this debate and provides an overview over some of the approach’s most basic assumptions that relate to its positive and normative implications.