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Full-Text Articles in Law
Do Legal Origins Predict Legal Substance?, Anu Bradford, Yun-Chien Chang, Adam S. Chilton, Nuno Garoupa
Do Legal Origins Predict Legal Substance?, Anu Bradford, Yun-Chien Chang, Adam S. Chilton, Nuno Garoupa
Faculty Scholarship
There is a large body of research in economics and law suggesting that the legal origin of a country – that is, whether its legal regime is based on English common law or French, German, or Nordic civil law – profoundly impacts a range of outcomes. However, the exact relationship between legal origin and legal substance has been disputed in the literature and not fully explored with nuanced legal coding. We revisit this debate while leveraging novel cross-country data sets that provide detailed coding of two areas of laws: property and antitrust. We find that having shared legal origins strongly …
Economic Development, Legality, And The Transplant Effect, Katharina Pistor, Daniel Berkowitz, Jean-Francois Richard
Economic Development, Legality, And The Transplant Effect, Katharina Pistor, Daniel Berkowitz, Jean-Francois Richard
Faculty Scholarship
This paper analyzes the determinants of effective legal institutions (legality) and their impact on economic development today using data from 49 countries. We show that the way the law was initially transplanted and received is a more important determinant than the supply of law from a particular legal family (i.e. English, French, German, or Scandinavian). Countries that have developed legal orders internally, adapted the transplanted law to local conditions, and/or had a population that was already familiar with basic legal principles of the transplanted law have more effective legality than "transplant effect" countries that received foreign law without any similar …