Law Commons^™

Re-Reading Weber In Law And Development: A Critical Intellectual History Of "Good Governance" Reform, Chantal Thomas

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The "Weberianism" of the modern age derives from the influence of three theoretical concepts in Weber's work. First, Weber described the development of "logically formal rationality" in governance as central to the rise of Western capitalist democracy. Second, Weber posited that Protestant religious ethics had helped to promote certain economic behaviors associated with contemporary capitalism. Third, Weber identified the rise of bureaucratic governance, as the primary means of realizing logically formal rationality, as distinctly modern.

This essay examines the influence of these basic insights on discourse on legal reform in developing countries. The prioritization of legal and institutional reforms to …

The Impossibility Of A Prescriptive Paretian, Robert C. Hockett

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Most normatively oriented economists appear to be “welfarist” and Paretian to one degree or another: They deem responsiveness to individual preferences, and satisfaction of one or more of the Pareto criteria, to be a desirable attribute of any social welfare function. I show that no strictly “welfarist” or Paretian social welfare function can be normatively prescriptive. Economists who prescribe must embrace at least one value apart from or additional to “welfarism” and Paretianism, and in fact will do best to dispense with Pareto entirely.

Lawyers, Citizens, And The Internal Point Of View, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Imagine two citizens, one of whom obeys the law only in order to avoid being sanctioned for noncompliance, the other of whom looks to the law for guidance, and regards legal directives as legitimate reasons for action in themselves. These two hypothetical citizens represent Oliver Wendell Holmes' metaphorical bad man and H.L.A. Hart's puzzled man, respectively. Both citizens take the law into account in their practical reasoning, but they are concerned with very different kinds of reasons created by law. Hart argues that the bad citizen's point of view is inadequate to capture the law's distinctive normativity. In response, some …