Göran Skogh, a Swedish economist, founded the European Association of Law and Economics (EALE) in Lund, Sweden, in 1984. The mission of EALE is to promote law and economics in Europe and to facilitate cooperation among scholars by creating an information network.

Economic analysis of law (or law and economics) analyzes legal rules and institutions using economic methods and starting from the general theoretical framework of modern microeconomics. Analyses can be positive (describing law's effects or explaining its evolution) or normative (determining what rules are optimal from an economic point of view). Though economic analysis of law has a tradition that goes back to authors such as Adam Smith (1723–1790), Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794), or Karl Marx (1818–1883), a more systematic, rigorous analysis of legal rules started ...