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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 …
Democracy, Courts And The Information Order, Gillian K. Hadfield, Dan Ryan Jr.
Democracy, Courts And The Information Order, Gillian K. Hadfield, Dan Ryan Jr.
Gillian K Hadfield
Conventional wisdom about civil litigation, both among scholars and political actors, holds that abuse of the legal process is common, that there is too much litigation, that it is “all about the money,” and that “a bad settlement is better than a good trial.” This constellation of attitudes that emphasize the economic function of law suggests that courts are an expensive conflict resolution mechanism of last resort and that their use would be minimized in a healthy market-based democracy. In this paper we apply a new sociological framework to understand the meaning and function of civil litigation in a democratic …
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 …
The Dynamic Quality Of Law: The Role Of Judicial Incentives And Legal Human Capital In The Adaptation Of Law, Gillian K. Hadfield
The Dynamic Quality Of Law: The Role Of Judicial Incentives And Legal Human Capital In The Adaptation Of Law, Gillian K. Hadfield
Gillian K Hadfield
Much of the existing literature investigating the relationship between legal regimes and economic growth focuses on the agency problem of aligning judicial incentives with social welfare. In this paper I look instead at the factors that in‡fluence the quality of law when judges have incentives to promote social welfare but they have limited knowledge about the environment in which law is to be applied. The key insight is that the capacity for a legal regime to generate value-enhancing legal adaptation to local and changing conditions depends on its capacity to generate and implement adequate expertise about the environment in which …
Higher Demand, Lower Supply? A Comparative Assessment Of The Legal Landscape For Ordinary Americans, Gillian K. Hadfield
Higher Demand, Lower Supply? A Comparative Assessment Of The Legal Landscape For Ordinary Americans, Gillian K. Hadfield
Gillian K Hadfield
In this paper I review the small amount of available data on the extent to which ordinary individuals in the U.S. have access to legal resources to navigate the law-thick world that Robert Kagan has famously called ‘adversarial legalism—the American way of law.’ I present this data in comparative context, relating what (little) we know about the availability of law in the U.S. to what (little) we know about the availability of law in other advanced societies and in countries transitioning to legally-mediated market democracy. I review first a set of ‘legal needs’ surveys that ask households about their experiences …
The Role Of International Law Firms And Multijural Legal Human Capital In The Harmonization Of Legal Regimes, Gillian K. Hadfield
The Role Of International Law Firms And Multijural Legal Human Capital In The Harmonization Of Legal Regimes, Gillian K. Hadfield
Gillian K Hadfield
The problem of harmonizing legal rules across multiple overlapping legal orders is, in part, a problem of knowledge. If the public goal of harmonization is to promote value in transactions and dispute resolution, a legal regime needs institutions that facilitate the production of multijural human capital: expertise about how legal rules interact with each other and with the environment in which economic actors design transactions and dispute processing mechanisms. Because much of this expertise is embedded with the actors involved in transactions and disputes, the production of expertise has to be supported by adequate incentives for private actors to invest …
The Dynamic Quality Of Law: The Role Of Judicial Incentives And Legal Human Capital In The Adaptation Of Law, Gillian K. Hadfield
The Dynamic Quality Of Law: The Role Of Judicial Incentives And Legal Human Capital In The Adaptation Of Law, Gillian K. Hadfield
Gillian K Hadfield
Much of the existing literature investigating the relationship between legal regimes and economic growth focuses on the agency problem of aligning judicial incentives with social welfare. In this paper I look instead at the factors that influence the quality of law when judges have incentives to promote social welfare but they have limited knowledge about the environment in which law is to be applied. The key insight is that the capacity for a legal regime to generate value-enhancing legal adaptation to local and changing conditions depends on its capacity to generate and implement adequate expertise about the environment in which …
The Public And The Private In The Provision Of Law For Global Transactions, Gillian K. Hadfield
The Public And The Private In The Provision Of Law For Global Transactions, Gillian K. Hadfield
Gillian K Hadfield
In this essay, I revisit the public/private divide in order to explore more fully the potential for private production of law in global exchange and also to clarify what I think are differences in the way common law and civil legal scholars think about the public and the private in law.
The Strategy Of Methodology: The Virtues Of Being Reductionist For Comparative Law, Gillian K. Hadfield
The Strategy Of Methodology: The Virtues Of Being Reductionist For Comparative Law, Gillian K. Hadfield
Gillian K Hadfield
In this comment I respond to three comments by comparative legal scholars on my paper "Levers of Legal Design: Institutional Determinants of the Quality of Law." In this comment I respond to concerns about the potential for the reductionist methodology employed by economist to illuminate issues in comparative law, particularly in light of commitments in comparative legal scholarship to deep understanding of culture and respect for different legal systems.
The Levers Of Legal Design: Institutional Determinants Of The Quality Of Law, Gillian K. Hadfield
The Levers Of Legal Design: Institutional Determinants Of The Quality Of Law, Gillian K. Hadfield
Gillian K Hadfield
In the past decade a comparative law and economics literature has emerged that is largely organized around an effort to explain differences in country economic performance in terms of differences between common law and civil code systems. Assumptions about differences between common law and civil code regimes and the correspondence between legal regimes and judicial behavior are, however, still only weakly based in real institutional features of modern legal systems. In this paper, I examine the institutional determinants of the quality of law developed by a legal regime, drawing on a model from Hadfield (2006) which identifies five key parameters …
The Many Legal Institutions That Support Contractual Commitment, Gillian K. Hadfield
The Many Legal Institutions That Support Contractual Commitment, Gillian K. Hadfield
Gillian K Hadfield
One of the fundamental contributions of transaction cost theory and institutional economics has been to focus attention on opening the "black box" of contract enforcement, drawing attention to the institutions required to achieve effective and low-cost contract enforcement. The idea that the effectiveness of contract law is critical to the growth of economic activity is widespread in the literature on development and transition economies. Recent studies attempting to document toe relative strength of contract enforcement in different settings (La Porta, et al., 19982; Djankov, et al., 2003), however, have focused on relatively abstract notions of "courts" and "legal systems" and …