🇨🇦 Happy Canada Day! 🇨🇦 One of the most fascinating sessions at this year’s meeting of the History of Economics Society (HES) at the University of Richmond was the “Roundtable on the 50th anniversary of the Buchanan-Samuels Exchange.” (Their exchange was published in 1975 on pages 15-38 of Volume 9 of the Journal of Economic Issues.) During this roundtable, which took place yesterday (30 June) and featured my colleagues and friends Marianne Johnson (Wisconsin), M. Ali Khan (Johns Hopkins), David M. Levy (George Mason), Steven Medema (Duke), Gary Mongiovi (St. John’s), and Emily Skarbek (Brown), I learned that the wellspring of the original exchange between James Buchanan and Warren J. Samuels was an old law case: Miller et al. v. Schoene. I will revisit this controversial case and pinpoint the underlying source of Buchanan and Samuels’s disagreement over how the case was decided in my next few posts …