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As the founder of the Center for Law and Economics at George Mason University and dean emeritus of the George Mason School of Law, Henry G. Manne is one of the founding scholars of law and economics as a discipline. This three-volume collection includes articles, reviews, and books from more than four decades, featuring Wall Street in Transition, which redefined the commonly held view of the corporate firm.

Volume 1, The Economics of Corporations and Corporate Law, includes Manne’s seminal writings on corporate law and his landmark blend of economics and law that is today accepted as a standard discipline, showing how Manne developed a comprehensive theory of the modern corporation that has provided a framework for legal, economic, and financial analysis of the corporate firm.

Manne’s most auspicious work in corporate law began with the two pieces from the Columbia Law Review that appear in volume 1, says general editor Fred S. McChesney. Editor Henry Butler adds: “Henry Manne was an innovator challenging the very foundations of the current learning.” “The ‘Higher Criticism’ of the Modern Corporation” was Manne’s first attempt at refuting the all too common notion that corporations were merely devices that allowed managers to plunder shareholders. Manne saw that such a view of corporations was inconsistent with the basic economic assumption that individuals either understand or soon will understand the costs and benefits of their own situations and that they respond according to rational self-interest.

“In recent years writers have begun to show increasing concern about the giant corporations dominant in The American economy. Their concern has ranged from the traditional American fear of monopoly power to more esoteric notions of the applicability of constitutional principles to these non-state aggregations of wealth and power. The various schools of thoughts are only just beginning to become clearly discernible. It is possible now, though with considerable reservation, to classify and find a patern in these intellectual developments.”

Henry G. Manne

Henry G. Manne received a B.A., cum laude, in Economics in 1950 at Vanderbilt University, his J.D. at the University of Chicago Law School in 1952, and his S.J.D. at Yale Law School in 1966. He holds honorary doctorates in law from Seattle University, Universidad Francisco Maraquin (Guatemala), and George Mason University. He is Dean Emeritus and University Professor Emeritus at the George Mason University School of Law, where he was Dean from 1986-1996 and University Professor from 1986 to 1999. He has also taught at St. Louis University, the University of Wisconsin, George Washington University, the University of Rochester, University of Miami, and Emory University. He is presently Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ave Maria Law School in Naples, FL.

He is a member of numerous professional organizations and boards, and an Honorary Life Member of the American Law and Economics Association, which honored him as one of the four founders of the field of Law and Economics. Professor Manne has published many books and articles, with emphasis on law and economics, the free market, and securities regulation. His development of the theory of a "market for corporate control" is credited with opening the entire field of corporate law to economic analysis, and his 1966 book, "Insider Trading and the Stock Market," began, and still heavily influences, the vast literature on that subject. He is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal. The Liberty Fund, of Indianapolis, IN, recently published “The Collected Works of Henry G. Manne” in three volumes.

Among his notable educational innovations were the Law and Economics Center (LEC), the first academic center devoted to the development of the field of Law and Economics (presently part of the George Mason University School of Law); the Economics Institutes for Law Professors; the Law Institutes for Economists; the Economics Institutes for Federal Judges; the first specialized law degree program for Ph.D.'s in economics; and the first law school (George Mason) whose curriculum was built around the use of economics in law.