William M. Landes, Professor, University of Chicago; and Richard A. Posner, Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and Senior Lecturer, University of Chicago Law School (Harvard University Press, 1987)

Economist Landes and Judge Posner, in The Economic Structure of Tort Law, apply the law and economics principles of Posner's seminal Economic Analysis of Law to a specific body of law: common law torts. The authors formulate tort laws designed to maximize efficiency, and then compare the results to the existing laws. As with Judge Calabresi's analysis, Posner and Landes, in their theoretical rule-making, often are out-of-touch with how plaintiffs' lawyers, judges, and juries actually behave�and thus are too quick to assume the efficiency of certain common law rules. Nevertheless, this book is a classic in law and economics and is actually quite approachable by the non-economist reader.