«Право - Экономика - Экология» Как Новое Научное Направление И Его Прикладной Потенциал

The article deals with the Law and Economic of the Environment as a new and rather intensively developing branch of a fundamental research field, having its origins in the scientific schools of Law and Economics. Since these developments are not yet very well known to the Russian readers, the authors begin with an overview of the core concepts of this new field. Its subject is usually defined (and the authors follow this tradition) as the application of the economic theory (primarily microeconomics and welfare economics) to the analysis of the formation, the structure, the processes of law and of the legal institutions and of their impact on the performance of the economy. The new field «Law and Economic of the Environment» has its own fundamental and applied issues and helps to explain how law and the economy interact. The authors concentrate their attentions on some of the problems which are very important for the modern Russian situation such as, the choice of liability rules, the comparison of the advantages of environmental laws and regulation policy, property rights issues, criminal law as an instrument of environmental policy, the theory of the optimal penalties, etc. Special attention the authors pay on the public choice theory in its application to the environmental protection field.