This work analyzes the centrality of law in nineteenth-century historical and institutional economics and serves as a prehistory to the new institutional economics of the late twentieth century. Starting around 1830 the "new science of law" aimed to explain the working rules of human society by using the methodological individualist terms of economic discourse, stressing determination and evolutionism.

The new science employed the concept of an invariant homo oeconomicus, which had the effect of reducing law's diversity to diversity in the economic or transactional environment. A special premium was attached to covering laws that could account for the longitudinal and cross-sectional diversity of social experience. By this definition, the college of the new science included members of the German and English historical schools, notably Wilhelm Roscher, Karl Knies, Gustav Schmoller, Adolph Wagner, and Karl Bucher, early American institutionalists such as John R.

Commons, and others such as Emile de Laveleye, Carl Menger, Achillee Loria, and Max Weber.