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39 Eur. J.L. & Econ. 1 (2015)

handle is hein.journals/eurjlwec39 and id is 1 raw text is: Eur J Law Econ (2015) 39:1-2 DOI 10.1007/s10657-015-9482-3 Gary Becker Richard A. Posner © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015 I first met Gary Becker in 1968, at a dinner for members of committees to advise the President-elect (Nixon); I was on the antitrust committee and Becker on the education committee. But I didn't get to know him until he relocated from Columbia to the University of Chicago in 1970. Becker did notable work in areas, especially human capital (essentially, earning capacity) and employment, that were conventional economic fields. But his greatest originality lay in pushing out the boundaries of economics so that it encompassed a great range of nonmarket behavior. Economics theretofore had generally been defined by its subject matter, and its subject matter was the market, that is, transactions involving goods and money. For Becker economics was the theory of rational choice, and could be applied to nonmarket as well as market transactions, such as marriage, which he treated as analogous to the firm, with the wife (in the conventional marriage) engaged in household production and the husband in market production that generated money that could be used to buy goods for the household. Picking up where Bentham had left off two centuries earlier, Becker treated criminal punishment as a price regulating the output of crime and racial discrimination as a cost impeding transactions between whites and blacks. And these are just examples. The importance of Becker's work for me was that, when he began teaching at Chicago in 1970, the year after I had started teaching in the law school there and 2 years after beginning my academic career, my field of interest was economic analysis of law. And while there is of course legal regulation of economic behavior, much of law deals with nonmarket behavior, including the examples I just gave of marriage, crime, and discrimination, but also accidents and other noncriminal but harmful activity (including pollution, trespass, and defamation), trial procedures, R. A. Posner (E) U.S. Court of Appeals, 7th Circuit, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: Richard_Posner@ca7.uscourts.gov I Springer