About Us - International Center for Law & Economics

ICLE promotes the use of law & economics methodologies to inform public policy debates. We believe that intellectually rigorous, data-driven analysis will lead to efficient policy solutions that promote consumer welfare and global economic growth.

About Us

The International Center for Law & Economics is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research center. Working with a roster of more than fifty academic affiliates and research centers from around the globe, we develop and disseminate academic output to build the intellectual foundation for rigorous, economically-grounded policy.

Our primary activity is the funding, organization, management, and networking of our resident staff and affiliated scholars and centers. We also develop research programs, provide high-quality policy analysis, and organize conferences, roundtables, and symposia.

As an independent, privately funded research organization, ICLE does not accept government grants, is not attached to a university, and does not do “contract” research. Our resident scholars and affiliates address the issues they believe to be most pressing in the context of our shared mission. We are supported in our efforts by affiliated institutions, industry partners, and individuals who believe in our mission and in our ability to fulfill it.

ICLE’s work is dedicated to the memory of Armen Alchian (1914-2013) and Henry G. Manne (1928-2015).

“Academic economics is primarily useful,
both to the student and to the political leader, as a prophylactic against popular fallacy.”  

— Henry Simons

Henry G. Manne (1928-2015)

Dean Emeritus, George Mason University School of Law and Founder, Law & Economics Center

ICLE President & Founder Geoffrey Manne’s father, Henry Manne, 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.”

Armen Alchian (1914-2013)

Professor Emeritus, UCLA Department of Economics

Armen Alchian 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.”

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