Law Commons^™

Taking Private Ordering Seriously, Avery W. Katz

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, the rules and practices of private groups have attracted substantial attention within the field of law and economics. In applications ranging from Robert Ellickson's seminal work on rancher/farmer relations in Shasta County, California, to Lisa Bernstein's investigation of extralegal contractual relations among wholesale diamond traders, to Robert Cooter's study of aboriginal customs in Papua New Guinea, to Robert Scott and Alan Schwartz's analysis of the rulemaking procedures of the American Law Institute, an increasing number of legal and economic scholars have shown how private systems of rules work to regulate economic relations among the communities that adopt …