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Full-Text Articles in Economics
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 …
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 …
Rational Reasonableness: Toward A Positive Theory Of Public Reason, Gillian K. Hadfield, Stephen Macedo
Rational Reasonableness: Toward A Positive Theory Of Public Reason, Gillian K. Hadfield, Stephen Macedo
Gillian K Hadfield
Why is it important for people to agree on and articulate shared reasons for just laws, rather than whatever reasons they personally find compelling? What, if any, practical role does public reason play in liberal democratic politics? We argue that the practical role of public reason can be better appreciated by examining the structural similarities in normative and positive political theory. Specifically, we consider the analytical parallels between Rawls’ account of political liberalism and a rational choice model of legal order recently proposed by Hadfield & Weingast (2011). The positive model proposes that a shared system of reasoning—a common logic—plays …
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 …