Version: v1, Published online: 2001
Retrieved March 28, 2024, from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/biographical/hale-robert-lee-1884-1969/v-1
Article Summary
Hale was an important figure in both the American legal realist movement and the looser association of Institutional and Progressive economists writing in the first part of the twentieth century. His writings on the nature of property rights, coercion, and the role of the state in structuring private economic relations grew out of the shared intellectual and political project of the Realists and Institutionalists: to expose the role of legal institutions in the production and distribution of wealth, in order to debunk the notion that the market was a natural (pre-political) or neutral (apolitical) entity. His work is one of the most careful and elaborated critiques of economic and constitutional laissez faire to come out of the period, and has influenced the treatment of a number of topics in modern American legal thought, including the nature of coercion, the viability of the ‘public–private’ distinction in law, and the role of property, contract and tort law in structuring the market economy.
Fried, Barbara H.. Hale, Robert Lee (1884–1969), 2001, doi:10.4324/9780415249126-T067-1. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/biographical/hale-robert-lee-1884-1969/v-1.
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