It’s one thing for a blogger to suggest that there is something inherently wrong with the arguments of “people without serious legal training [who] comment on the law.” That’s just argumentum ad verecundiam. But it’s especially ironic coming from a blogger who doesn’t reveal his credentials and hides behind a pseudonym.

That same blogger writes:

I don’t think that economics is the best field to inform issues of substantive law, unless, of course, the substantive law explicitly refers to economic decisions.

Of course, all substantive law—tort, contract, property, criminal—explicitly refers to economic decisions; anyone who thinks otherwise hasn’t had serious economic training or hasn’t thought about the law seriously, because economics is merely the study of choice and decision-making in a world of scarce resources. But perhaps Justice Holmes is also a dilettante for suggesting that incentives matter.

Others will be fascinated to learn from the blog post that “going to faculty committee meetings” is a prerequisite for economic analysis, and that Richard Posner, Dan Fischel, and Nobel Prize winner Ronald Coase are not economists because they lack Ph.D.s.