Laudatio: Francesco Parisi

Abstract

The European Association of Law and Economics (EALE) asked me to write a Laudatio. It is a great pleasure and honor to introduce Professor Francesco Parisi for the 2019 EALE Lifetime Achievement Award and Honorary Membership to the European Association of Law and Economics. Beginning in 2019, the recipient of the award will deliver the EALE Award lecture the year after the announcement of the prize. In the Award lecture, which will be published following these remarks in the Review of Law and Economics, Professor Parisi gave us a charming narrative of how he came to discover law and economics, and the important encounters in his life that brought him to where he is in the field of law and economics. I have known Professor Parisi for many years, and in this Laudatio, I shall take the liberty to refer to him as Francesco. Several factors contributed to his achievement of becoming one of the most influential writers in our discipline, including his dedication, tenacity, intelligence and sharpmindedness. For many years, Francesco studied law at the University of Rome and later at Berkeley School of Law. He is a lawyer through and through, possessing comprehensive knowledge and a subtle understanding of concepts and systems in law. He does not make readers believe that law is a sub-field or an appendix of economics, or as one prominent scholar – my friend Robert Cooter, who will forgive me for referring to him in this context – once suggested, that torts, contracts and property form a unity, are all the same, and have no life of their own. Also, in my view, it is important that Francesco received his first academic training in Italy, a country with a rich tradition of institutional thinking and scholarship, and a country that has produced some of the most important contemporary research results for institutional economics. This tradition has always been kept alive in Italy and was not crowded out by neoclassical economics, which disregarded the economic importance of institutions. Francesco made early contacts with the civil law scholar Pietro Trimarchi from Milan, who in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, single-handedly and independently, published a series of foundational papers, which contain essential insights for our discipline. The pioneering Guido Calabresi, who has an Italian background too, once told me that he has the highest regards for Trimarchi’s