Rating: 
Summary: A fun, clear read
Review: A book on an interesting topic, written more for the layman than for the specialist (but with references for the latter), Law's Order introduces the basic economic aparatus necessary for the analysis of the effects of different legal rules. Friedman (more than his father) is an especially good author for people who quickly dismiss economic models as overly simplistic, both because he is aware of the real limitations of simplified models and because he defends the real benefit in understanding that they often provide. Here he applies his clarity to the questions of why the law is the way it is, and what impact its features have on its effects. Especially interesting to me were the discussions, near the end, of the legal systems in place in Iceland and England centuries ago, and how sets of social norms can function in place of legal rules, and be subject to the same analysis. Throughout the book he implies that the book is meant as something of a rejoinder to Posner's theory that common law is economically efficient, but this becomes a small dog being wagged by the broad discussion needed to bring most of his readers up to speed; when he does take on Posner's thesis directly, it is interesting, respectful, and well-reasoned, but is only a small part of the appeal of the book, which is based more on the survey that precedes it.
Rating:
Summary: Well written, well reasoned, and inspiringly insightful
Review: A fairly dry book based on a biased opinion. This book isn't helpful for anyone trying to broaden their knowledge on Law. Browse through the book at a bookstore, but don't buy it.
Rating:
Summary: Compelling reading about a different kind of "legal" system.
Review: Anyone who has had the privilige of debating David Friedman on the Internet knows that he is though-provoking. Most books about law discuss this loophole or that bias or perhaps the outrage du jour. What is missing, though, is an alterative system.David Friedman comes at the subject from a different angle. What if the legal system operated like any other market system? Well, not just ANY other market system. One of the presumptions is that to be truly efficient the market must be completely free. Any system today is encumbered by vested interests, many of which can be traced back to an economic concern. Why not bring that out into the open? Would you subscribe to a traffic court where penalties were based on how much economic damage your behavior caused? In a way, you already do! You'll be thinking that way about all manner of legal issues after reading this book. A good addition to anyone's shelf, especially those of us who enjoy a philosphical reality check.
Rating:
Summary: Compelling reading about a different kind of "legal" system.
Review: Anyone who has had the privilige of debating David Friedman on the Internet knows that he is though-provoking. Most books about law discuss this loophole or that bias or perhaps the outrage du jour. What is missing, though, is an alterative system. David Friedman comes at the subject from a different angle. What if the legal system operated like any other market system? Well, not just ANY other market system. One of the presumptions is that to be truly efficient the market must be completely free. Any system today is encumbered by vested interests, many of which can be traced back to an economic concern. Why not bring that out into the open? Would you subscribe to a traffic court where penalties were based on how much economic damage your behavior caused? In a way, you already do! You'll be thinking that way about all manner of legal issues after reading this book. A good addition to anyone's shelf, especially those of us who enjoy a philosphical reality check.
Rating:
Summary: Should Voodoo practice be punishable?
Review: As soon as I was finished with this book, I turned around and read it again. Friedman is picking up a theme that he introduced towards the end of the revised Machinery of Freedom, in which he states that in order to understand certain mechanisms, we must undertake the economic analysis of law. This discipline was generally considered to have been initiated by Ronald Coase and taken up and popularized by Richard Posner. Friedman's own work advances the study into areas of law that relate to the internet and computers.
This particular book, however, concentrates on advancing the work done by Posner to a wider audience. Posner's perspective is that of a very, very talented legal theorist attempting to apply economic tools to law; Friedman's is that of a very talented economist applying his own discipline to law.
The complete book is available online; in fact the book was intended to be an off-line anchor for a number of other links. Friedman does away with references to landmark cases, mathematics, and other references in the book, and moves them all to the online version. While it seemed like a good idea at thte time, I ultimately found it to be annoying. I would say that this is the first book I've read that connects technical economic ideas - like efficiency, the Coase Theorem, externalities, and rent-seeking - to the real world with practical applications. Like whether or not voodoo practice should be punishable as attempted murder (huh? Read the book - this and other stories are both entertaining and enlightening).
Rating:
Summary: Should Voodoo practice be punishable?
Review: As soon as I was finished with this book, I turned around and read it again. Friedman is picking up a theme that he introduced towards the end of the revised Machinery of Freedom, in which he states that in order to understand certain mechanisms, we must undertake the economic analysis of law. This discipline was generally considered to have been initiated by Ronald Coase and taken up and popularized by Richard Posner. Friedman's own work advances the study into areas of law that relate to the internet and computers.
This particular book, however, concentrates on advancing the work done by Posner to a wider audience. Posner's perspective is that of a very, very talented legal theorist attempting to apply economic tools to law; Friedman's is that of a very talented economist applying his own discipline to law.
The complete book is available online; in fact the book was intended to be an off-line anchor for a number of other links. Friedman does away with references to landmark cases, mathematics, and other references in the book, and moves them all to the online version. While it seemed like a good idea at thte time, I ultimately found it to be annoying. I would say that this is the first book I've read that connects technical economic ideas - like efficiency, the Coase Theorem, externalities, and rent-seeking - to the real world with practical applications. Like whether or not voodoo practice should be punishable as attempted murder (huh? Read the book - this and other stories are both entertaining and enlightening).
Rating:
Summary: Challenging and Thought-Provoking Reflections
Review: At the outset, I must acknowledge that this proved to be one of the most challenging books I have read in recent years. (You can thus understand why it was also among the most thought-provoking books I have read in recent years.) The subtitle informed me that Friedman would explain "what economics has to do with law and why it matters." In the Introduction, he observes: "The legal rules that we are most familiar with are laws created by legislatures and enforced by courts and police. But even in our society much of the law is the creation of not of legislatures but of judges, embedded in past precedences that determine how future cases will be decided; much enforcement of the law is by private parties such as tort victims and their lawyers rather than by police; and substantial bodies of legal rules take the form, not the laws, but of private norms, privately enforced." Friedman helps his reader to "understand various systems of legal rules by asking what consequences they will produce in a world in which rational individuals adjust their actions to the legal rules they face." He cites two possible objectives of the economic approach to achieve such understanding the logic of law: the law may have no logic to understand or the law does have a logic "but that it is, or at least ought to be, concerned not with economic efficiency but with justice." These are indeed critically important issues. How to address them? Friedman does so with an economic analysis of the law in terms of both economic ideas and areas of the law. First, he examines basic economic concepts (e.g.) "that can be used to to understand a wide range of legal issues. Then he shifts his attention to various questions raised what that examination reveals. For example: Why do other legal systems differ so much from ours? Why have two legal systems -- tort law and criminal law -- which "do roughly the same thing [but] in different ways?" Why not eliminate one of them? What arguments can be made to support or oppose the view that "judge-made law" is economically efficient? In the final chapter, he summarizes "what we have learned about systems of legal rules" throughout his extended analysis of the interaction of law with economics. If I correctly understand what Friedman has shared throughout the book (and I may well do not), his ultimate objective is to create what is (in effect) a rough draft of what in final form would be a much more efficient legal system. Such a system would presumably increase the efficiency of other domestic systems (e..g. political and economic) as well as, in all probability, the efficiency of those systems' interaction with counterparts in other countries. For me at least, this was not an easy book to read, in part because I lack any formal education in either law or economics but also because of the inherent difficulty of drawing correlations and suggesting cause-and-effect relationships between two such complex human enterprises...
Rating: 
Summary: Good introduction to the topic
Review: Clearly written, good for the smart layperson. A helpful and persuasive introduction to law and economics as concieved by the Chicago school, though some of Friedman's more radical policy suggestions (nearer the end) may make you wonder if we haven't missed something conceptually important; I also recommend Malloy's "Law and Economics" for a broader perspective that offers a critique of the implicit assumptions Friedman's chosen model without endorsing a contrary position. (For those who do want the contrary of Friedman's viewpoint, there's the whole field of critical legal studies out there.)
Rating:
Summary: interesting read, annoying footnote approach
Review: David Friedman is anarcho-capitalist who teaches economics to law students. This book, written mainly for laymen, shows both sides of him. He explains the relevant ideas from economics quite well and applies them to legal questions. He argues that even apart from moral arguments, many laws can be justified by economic efficiency. The logic is something like this: Stealing is a process where someone takes something away from someone without the consent of that person. One loses, one gains. So what's the problem? The problem is that the thief spends energy on stealing, the potential victims on securing themselves and to some degree they produce less, since they may not keep everything. Therefore stealing is inefficient in a certain sense. Many laws can be justified on such grounds. He also describes the legal system of ancient Iceland, a system that worked without government. Inspired by that, Friedman proposes some rather radical ideas like allowing murderes to buy themselves free. It also happens that the more radical ideas are the ones with the worst arguments in favor of them. He makes some rather strange assumptions (like that murderes are able to pay millions of dollars...). The book is clearly biased, but it is well written and explains economic ideas quite nicely. It's also pobably the only book on law and economics that is written for laymen.
Rating:
Summary: not a bad book
Review: It's a pretty good book...
Oh and one big real why I even decided to write a review is that David Friedman is actually the son of Milton Friedman. But that is not mentioned anywhere in the book, which is a nice gesture of anti-nepotism. Anyhow back to the merits of the book. The topics are quite easy to grasp and very interesting. After reading this you may want to go check out game theory and the law which is more specialized. The book is well written and we use it for our economics analysis of law class.
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