About Us

Armen Alchian

Armen Alchian (1914-2013) was a pioneer of new institutional economics and an intellectual forebear of the Law & Economics movement. His intuitive, non-technical (but rigorous and thoughtful) approach to economic questions is the model for ICLE’s work.

Professor Alchian’s focus on the importance of institutions to economic and legal analysis and his unwavering efforts to explain complex, real-world phenomena with the powerful insights provided by property rights theory and the theory of the firm have inspired generations of scholars. Armen Alchian has also been a teacher, mentor and friend to many of those affiliated with ICLE.

Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek is purported to have said of Alchian, “There are two economists who deserve the Nobel prize because their work is important but won’t get it because they didn’t do a lot of work: Ronald Coase and Armen Alchian.”

Henry G. Manne

ICLE President & Founder Geoffrey Manne’s father, Henry Manne (1928-2015), was one of the founders of Law & Economics, an honor he shares with Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase and US Court of Appeals judges Richard Posner and Guido Calabresi. Henry was Dean of the George Mason University School of Law and founder (in 1973) of the first academic center devoted to the development of Law & Economics.

Ron Cass, Dean Emeritus of Boston University School of Law said, “[Henry] has made more of a difference at more margins than virtually any other professor of his generation. [His] accomplishments, however, cannot readily be compassed, and a view of details will not capture how he has changed the course of legal scholarship and teaching, of judicial decision-making, of the law, and of so many lives.”