Alert the US Chamber of Commerce – economists can see lawyers as an economic positive, as detailed below in a post from the Conglomerate. But, no doubt the Chamber would point out that the medieval German lawyers probably were not litigators – we are just bad guys getting in the way of the various spreadsheet jockeys sometimes portrayed as masters of the universe.
Lawyers as Transaction Cost Engineers in Medieval Germany
Posted by Erik Gerding
Here is a highly productive way for business law professors to procrastinate from grading exams:
The National Bureau of Economic Research just circulated a new version of a paper that provides a medieval complement to the law & finance literature and to Gilson’s lawyer as transaction cost engineer idea. The paper by Davide Cantoni and Noam Yuchtman presents evidence that the training of commercial lawyers by new universities contributed to the expansion of economic activity in medieval Germany.