The Symbolic Aspects of Law Between Expressive Theories and Economic Analysis

The symbolic aspects of both law and behaviour under the law are independent of enforcement and depend on the way social norms interact with legal rules and principles. The outcomes of such interaction can be hard to explain from an economic standpoint, and a strand of ‘expressivist’ thought focusing on these aspects has thus emerged, setting itself in opposition to, and as incompatible with, rational choice theory and the economic analysis of law. But expressive and economic accounts of the law can nonetheless fruitfully cooperate, provided that the former relinquish their typical hostility towards consequentialism and the latter renounce their claim to exclusively rely on monetary measurements of value and show themselves open to alternative methods for measuring and making interpersonal comparisons of utility.