I did a quick and dirty search for references to Albert O. Hirschman's work in law journals. There were over 1,000 hits on WestLaw, which, to my mind, indicates this economist may be someone whose work is worth law students getting familiar.
Jeremy Adelman, Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2013).
Albert O. Hirschman, The Essential Hirschman, edited and with an introduction by Jeremy Edelman, and and afterword by Emma Rothschild & Amartya Sen (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2013).
Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton Classics), with a foreword by Amartya Sen, and an afterword by Jeremy Adelman (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2013) ("The opposite kind of forgetfulness is also in evidence: it consists of trotting out the identical ideas that had been put forward at an earlier period, without any references to the encounter they had already had with reality, an encounter that is seldom wholly satisfactory." Id. at 133.).
Albert O. Hischman, A Propensity to Self-Subversion (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 1995) (From "The Case against 'One Thing at a Time'": "[L]eisurely, sequential problem-solving is not necessarily a pure blessing, as has been so plausibly argued in the literature on political development. Sequential problem-solving brings with it the risk of getting stuck. This risk may apply not only to the sequence form the production of consumer goods to that of machinery and intermediate goods, but, in a different form, to the complex progression sketched in a famous 1949 lecture by the English sociologist T. H. Marshall [T. H. Marshall, "Citizenship and Social Class," in T. H. Marshall, Class, Citizenship, and Social Development (New York: Doubleday, 1965)]: from individual liberties to universal suffrage and on to the welfare state. A society which has pioneered in securing individual liberties is likely to experience special difficulties in subsequently establishing comprehensive social welfare policies. The very values that served such a society well in one phrase--the belief in the supreme value of individuality, the insistence on individual achievement and individual responsibility--may be something of an embarrassment later on, when a communitarian ethos of solidarity needs to be stressed." Id. at 69, 74 (citations omitted).
Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap Press/Harvard U. Press, 1991) (Do they even teach rhetoric to undergraduates in college? Or, have it been eliminated as part of the cutback in liberal arts education? Regardless, serous law students should study rhetoric. "The unsettling experience of being shut off, not just from the opinions, but from the entire life experience of large numbers of one's contemporaries is actually typical of modern democratic societies. In these days of universal celebration of the democrat model, it may seem churlish to dwell on deficiencies in the functioning of Western democracies. [] Among them there is one that can frequently be found in the more advanced democracies: the systematic lack of communication between groups of citizens, such as liberals and conservative, progressives and reactionaries. The resulting separateness of these large groups from one another seems more worrisome to me than the isolation of anomic individuals in 'mass society' of which sociologists have made so much." Id at ix-x. "[T]he perversity thesis asserts that 'the attempt to push society in a certain direction will result in its moving all right, but in the opposite direction'." Id. at 43. "The futility thesis" asserts "that the attempt to change is abortive, that in one way or another any alleged change is, was, or will be largely surface, facade, cosmetic, hence illusory, as the 'deep' structures of society remain whole untouched." Id. at 42. "The Jeopardy thesis": "if it can be shown that two reforms are in some sense mutual exclusive so that the older will be endangered by the newer, then an element of comparability enters into the argument and the evaluation can proceed in vaguely common 'coin of progress': does it make sense to sacrifice the old progress for the new.?" Id. at 84. "'Reactionaries' have no monopoly on simplistic, peremptory, and intransigent rhetoric. Their 'progressive' counterparts are likely to do just as well in this regard, and a book similar to the present one could probably be written about the principal arguments and rhetorical positions these folks have taken up over the last two centuries or so in making their case." Id. at 140.).
In addition, I suggest the following readings:
Jeremy Adelman, Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford U. Press, 1999) ("This book describes the collapse, beginning in the late eighteenth century, of the Spanish Empire in the River Plate region of South America, followed by the pendular swings between state-building and civil war, and a culminating triumph of liberal constitutionalism in the 1860's; it traces the transition from colonial Natural Law to instrumental liberal understandings of property. As such, the developments of constitutionalism and property law were more than coincidences: the agony of the polity shaped the rituals and practices arbitrating economic justice, while the crisis of property animated the support for a centralized and executive-dominated state. In dialectical fashion, politics shaped private law while the effort to formulate the domain of property directed the course of political struggles." Id. at 2. My favorite passage: "One exasperated asesor gently upbraided the magistrate for mishandling a suit over the delivery of stale beer. What should have been a simple affair, noted the adviser, became a long, drawn out, and cumbersome process because the judge unwittingly admitted false testimonies and doctored books from both sides. Sorting out the mess was nearly impossible. (To be fair to the judge, the litigants hired a couple of long-winded obfuscating lawyers to bamboozle the court.) In his prelude to a long and thoughtful disentangling, the court adviser urged 'that no prominent deed must be omitted, especially those generally used and consecrated in commerce and sanctioned as necessities to lend a certain character of legality to all transactions, which, like all human acts, should be based on good faith and rectitude of procedures.'" Id. at 241.).
Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2006).
