Over the last half-century, the economic approach to law (or “law and economics”) has become the most successful instance of “economic imperialism,” the extension of the neoclassical economic paradigm to other fields of study. Given the shortcomings of that paradigm, however, law-and-economics misses much of the complexity of human choice and the ethical nature of the law that cannot be captured in terms of utility and efficiency alone. Social economics, on the other hand, emphasizes the importance of ethical values to economic theory, practice, and policy, but to date it has engaged very little with the law. Perhaps this is due to an antipathy to the economic imperialism of mainstream law-and-economics. After all, social economists tend to be methodological pluralists that respect the contributions and insights of other disciplines. But we do not have to “co-opt” the law in order to apply social economics thinking to problems involving the law or to incorporate legal aspects of the economy and society into our work. By its very nature, law is a social enterprise concerned with values such as justice, dignity, and equality, as well as efficiency—which is how social economists conceive of the economy itself. The economy and the law work together within a society to influence economic behavior and outcomes, and social economists need to acknowledge this interrelationship if we hope to understand the broader nature of the social economy we study.