Economist mentored well-known jurists

Aaron Director, 102, the celebrated free-market economist who helped unite the fields of law and economics and mentored several generations of scholars, died Saturday at his home in Los Altos Hills, Calif.

Director, who published sparingly, was perhaps best known for his influence on his students and colleagues at the University of Chicago Law School, who included the jurists Robert Bork and Richard Posner. He also founded in 1958 the Journal of Law & Economics, which he co-edited with Nobel laureate Ronald Coase.

After a restless and often radically leftist youth, Director joined the Chicago law faculty in 1946. He became part of a clique known as the "Chicago School" of economists, which included Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, his brother-in-law. The Chicago School reached a peak of influence during the Reagan administration.

In analyzing antitrust law -- his specialty -- Director took a grim view of government control and blessed market forces. He wrote that New Deal policies harmed consumers and spent his career trying to explain perceived monopolies from a corporation's perspective.

Director was so adamant in his beliefs that he wrote to his sister, Rose, shortly before her marriage to Friedman in 1938, "Tell him I shall not hold his very strong New Deal leanings -- authoritarian to use an abusive term -- against him."

Later Friedman, who became an icon of conservative economic thought, jokingly introduced Director as "my radical brother-in-law."

Along with his friend Chicago economist Henry Simons, he became a key and early proponent of bringing economic thought to legal questions, particularly antitrust matters.

At a panel discussion at the University of Chicago in 1950, he argued a stringently pro-business line to reduce taxes on large corporations and eliminate tariff protections.

"There is room neither for subsidies to individual economic activities or for price fixing of particular products," he said. "Monopolistic determination of wages is in no sense different from monopolistic fixing of enterprises. If they are not to be trusted with governing industry, neither are unions."