Fundamental critiques of the economic analysis of law

Leff, Arthur Allen. "Economic Analysis of law: some realism about nominalism." Virginia Law Review 60 (1974): 451.

    [O]ne is struck by the picture of American society presented by Posner. For it seems to be one which regulates its affairs in rather a bizarre fashion: it has created one grand system--the market, and those market-supportive aspects of law (notably "common," judge-made law)--which is almost flawless in achieving human happiness; it has created another--the political process, and the rest of "the law" (roughly legislation and administration)--which is apparently almost wholly pernicious of those aims.
    In brief, there seems to be some normative content in Posner's neo-Panglossianism after all. Only some kinds of inequality are to be accepted as an unquestionable grandnorm upon which to base efficiency analyses. The transfers that come about against a background of wealth inequality are fine; any that come about against a background of inequality in strength, or the power to organize and apply strength, are unjustifiable. Some inequalities are apparently more equal than others--and all without reference to any apparent normative criterion at all."

White, James Boyd. "Economics and law: two cultures in tension." Tennessee Law Review 54 (1987): 161

    [T]o reduce the ideas of voluntary action, autonomy, and liberty to mere freedom from restraint, or, even more narrowly, to freedom from governmental restraint...is deeply impoverishing. For us [professors of law] political liberty has not meant merely freedom from restraint but enablement or capacitation, and this is always social and communal in character. The question is not only how far people are free or restrained in their exercise of dominion over the assets that nature and society give them, but far more importantly, what our community enables its people to do or to become. What range of responsibilities and participations, what opportunities for self-development and education, what roles for self-government, does this community offer its members? These are the serious questions about liberty that one could imagine fighting and perhaps dying for, liberty as an aspect of community. To speak to such questions one needs a standard of human and political excellence of a kind that economics by its nature cannot have....
    The great phrase in the Declaration of Independence--'all men are created equal'--is partly a theological statement about the conditions under which we are created and partly a political statement about the obligation of government to acknowledge, indeed to create or recreate, that equality.