The Liberty Fund has announced the publication of a three volume set of the collected works of one of my personal heroes, Henry Manne:
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.I was tremendously honored to be asked to edit Volume 2. Henry's contributions to our understanding of insider trading have been invaluable, as I explained in the introduction to my volume (which you can download here):
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.
Volume 2, Insider Trading, uses Manne’s ground-breaking Insider Trading and the Stock Market as a framework for many of Manne’s innovative contributions to the field, as well as a fresh context for understanding the complex world of corporate law and securities regulation.
Volume 3, Liberty and Freedom in the Economic Ordering of Society, includes selections exploring Manne’s thoughts on corporate social responsibility, on the regulation of capital markets and securities offerings, especially as examined in Wall Street in Transition, on the role of the modern university, and on the relationship among law, regulation, and the free market.
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.
Fred S. McChesney is James B. Haddad Professor of Law at the Northwestern School of Law, focusing on business and antitrust law and their intersection with economic theory. He has been an associate director for policy and evaluation at the Federal Trade Commission.
Henry N. Butler, editor of volume 1, is Executive Director of the Searle Center on Law, Regulation, and Economic Growth at Northwestern University School of Law.
Stephen M. Bainbridge, editor of volume 2, is William D. Warren Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law.
Jonathan R. Macey, editor of volume 3, is Sam Harris Professor of Corporate Law, Securities Law, and Corporate Finance and is deputy dean at Yale Law School.
Henry Manne’s 1966 book INSIDER TRADING AND THE STOCK MARKET ... ranks among the truly seminal events in the economic analysis of law. One exaggerates only slightly to say that Manne stunned the corporate law academy by daring to propose the deregulation of insider trading. As we will see, the response by all too many traditionalist scholars was immediate and vitriolic.
Although Manne’s policy prescriptions have found neither legislative nor regulatory acceptance, history has vindicated Manne’s daring in at least one important respect. Although it is hard to believe at this remove, corporate law scholarship was moribund during much of the middle decades of the last century. Manne’s work on insider trading played a major role in ending that long intellectual drought by stimulating interest in economic analysis of corporate law. Whether one agrees with Manne’s views on insider trading or not, one therefore must give him due credit for helping to stimulate the outpouring of important law and economics scholarship in corporate law and securities regulation in recent decades.
If you want to order the set and support my blog at the same time, you can do so via my Amazon Associates store by clicking the following link: COLLECTED WORKS OF HENRY G. MANNE 3 VOL CL SET, THE
Or you can do likewise by ordering Henry's Insider Trading and the Stock Market
And, of course, there's always my book: Securities Law: Insider Trading (Turning Point Series)
