One of the great privileges of my life was getting to know Henry Manne. He was consistently kind, supportive (even when we disagreed), and generous. He frequently gave me constructive--if sometimes devastating--criticism of my work, which always helped make the pieces on which he commented far stronger than they otherwise would have been. And he was a wonderful person to enjoy a meal with, as he was a great storyteller and a brilliant wit.
So I was deeply honored when I was asked, at Henry's suggestion, to edit the insider trading volume of his collected works. As I wrote in the introduction to that volume:
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.
As George Priest has observed, moreover, Henry's influence extended beyond just corporate and securities law to the entire breadth of the law and economics movement:
Manne introduced, popularized, and extended law and economics to thousands. Manne achieved this influence in three basic ways: first, his instructional programs of law for economists and economics for lawyers; second, his programs on various law and economics topics for judges; third, and to my mind just as important, the academic conferences that he organized, many supported by the Liberty Fund.
