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Legal Regimes And Political Particularism: An Assessment Of The "Legal Families" Theory From The Perspectives Of Comparative Law And Political Economy, John W. Cioffi, D. Gordon Smith
Legal Regimes And Political Particularism: An Assessment Of The "Legal Families" Theory From The Perspectives Of Comparative Law And Political Economy, John W. Cioffi, D. Gordon Smith
BYU Law Review
The “legal families” theory of corporate law and ownership structures pioneered by Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-deSilanes, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny provides one of the most influential accounts of why “law matters” in shaping economic organization and outcomes. However, the empirical bases and theoretical logic of the theory contain serious flaws and limitations. First, as has been pointed out by a number of critics engaged in this revision, the legal origins literature contains numerous problematic characterizations of substantive law that expose the serious problems of quantitative operationalization of legal rules as a mode of comparative legal analysis. Second, the …