Abstract
The essay deals with six differences between legal (mainly formalist-doctrinal) and economic (policy analysis) reasoning about legal rules, institutes, and systems. The first difference consists in the prevalent direction of reasoning between more and less general, whereby legal reasoning is prevalently inductive and economic reasoning is prevalently deductive.
The second difference consists in the position of the observer towards the law, whereby lawyers are positioned within the law and economists outside of it. The third difference consists in the whole-like or segment-like approach, whereby lawyers prefer holist approach and economists prefer reductionist approach.
The fourth difference consists in retrospectiveness or prospectiveness of the approach, whereby lawyers view the law from the ex post perspective and economists from the ex ante perspective. The fifth difference consists in the emphasis on particular cases or their categories, whereby lawyers prefer analysis of particular cases and economists prefer to aggregate.
The sixth difference consists in preferring the categorical or the continuous, whereby lawyers prefer bright-line rules and economists tend to work with less clear distinctions. Nevertheless, the performed analysis reveals that some of the differences are only illusory or relate to only a particular aspect of law or economics.
Mainly law has properties that are not obvious at first sight (ex ante effect of legal rules, tension between justice at micro-level and macro-level).