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Full-Text Articles in Law
Building Legal Order In Ancient Athens, Federica Carugati, Gillian K. Hadfield, Barry Weingast
Building Legal Order In Ancient Athens, Federica Carugati, Gillian K. Hadfield, Barry Weingast
Gillian K Hadfield
How do democratic societies establish and maintain order in ways that are conducive to growth? Contemporary scholarship associates order, democracy, and growth with centralized rule of law institutions. In this article, we test the robustness of modern assumptions by turning to the case of ancient Athens. Democratic Athens was remarkably stable and prosperous, but the ancient city-state never developed extensively centralized rule of law institutions. Drawing on the “what-is-law” account of legal order elaborated by Hadfield and Weingast (2012),we show that Athens’ legal order relied on institutions that achieved common knowledge and incentive compatibility for enforcers in a largely decentralized …
Microfoundations Of The Rule Of Law, Gillian K. Hadfield, Barry R. Weingast
Microfoundations Of The Rule Of Law, Gillian K. Hadfield, Barry R. Weingast
Gillian K Hadfield
Many social scientists rely on the rule of law in their accounts of political or economic development. Many however simply equate law with a stable government capable of enforcing the rules generated by a political authority. As two decades of largely failed efforts to build the rule of law in poor and transition countries and continuing struggles to build international legal order demonstrate, we still do not understand how legal order is produced, especially in places where it does not already exist. We here canvas literature in the social sciences to identify the themes and gaps in the existing accounts. …
Law Without The State: Legal Attributes And The Coordination Of Decentralized Collective Punishment, Gillian K. Hadfield, Barry R. Weingast
Law Without The State: Legal Attributes And The Coordination Of Decentralized Collective Punishment, Gillian K. Hadfield, Barry R. Weingast
Gillian K Hadfield
Most economic and positive political theory presumes the existence of an effective legal regime (protecting property rights or implementing legislative or judicial choices, for example). Yet social science has devoted little systematic attention to the question of what constitutes distinctively legal order. Most social scientists take for granted that law is defined by the presence of a centralized authority capable of exacting coercive penalties for violations of legal rules. Moreover, the existing approach to analyzing law in economics and positive political theory works with a very thin concept of law, one that does not account for the distinctive attributes of …
What Is Law? A Coordination Model Of The Characteristics Of Legal Order, Gillian K. Hadfield, Barry R. Weingast
What Is Law? A Coordination Model Of The Characteristics Of Legal Order, Gillian K. Hadfield, Barry R. Weingast
Gillian K Hadfield
Legal philosophers have long debated the question, what is law? But few in social science have attempted to explain the phenomenon of legal order. In this article, we build a rational choice model of legal order in an environment that relies exclusively on decentralized enforcement, such as we find in human societies prior to the emergence of the nation state and inmanymodern settings.Wedemonstrate thatwecan support an equilibrium in which wrongful behavior is effectively deterred by exclusively decentralized enforcement, specifically collective punishment. Equilibrium is achieved by an institution that supplies a common logic for classifying behavior as wrongful or not. We …
Don’T Forget The Lawyers: Legal Human Capital And The Role Of Lawyers In Supporting The Rule Of Law, Gillian K. Hadfield
Don’T Forget The Lawyers: Legal Human Capital And The Role Of Lawyers In Supporting The Rule Of Law, Gillian K. Hadfield
Gillian K Hadfield
No abstract provided.