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Articles 1 - 8 of 8
Full-Text Articles in Law
Microfoundations Of The Rule Of Law, Gillian K. Hadfield, Barry R. Weingast
Microfoundations Of The Rule Of Law, Gillian K. Hadfield, Barry R. Weingast
Gillian K Hadfield
Many social scientists rely on the rule of law in their accounts of political or economic development. Many however simply equate law with a stable government capable of enforcing the rules generated by a political authority. As two decades of largely failed efforts to build the rule of law in poor and transition countries and continuing struggles to build international legal order demonstrate, we still do not understand how legal order is produced, especially in places where it does not already exist. We here canvas literature in the social sciences to identify the themes and gaps in the existing accounts. …
Constitutions As Coordinating Devices, Gillian K. Hadfield, Barry R. Weingast
Constitutions As Coordinating Devices, Gillian K. Hadfield, Barry R. Weingast
Gillian K Hadfield
Why do successful constitutions have the attributes characteristically associated with the rule of law? Why do constitutions involve public reasoning? And, how is such a system sustained as an equilibrium? In this paper, we adapt the framework in our previous work on “what is law?” to the problem of constitutions and their enforcement (see Hadfield and Weingast 2012, 2013a,b). We present an account of constitutional law characterized by two features: a system of distinctive reasoning and process that is grounded in economic and political functionality; and a set of legal attributes such as generality, stability, publicity, clarity, non-contradictoriness, and consistency. …
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 …
The Role Of International Law Firms And Multijural Legal Human Capital In The Harmonization Of Legal Regimes, Gillian K. Hadfield
The Role Of International Law Firms And Multijural Legal Human Capital In The Harmonization Of Legal Regimes, Gillian K. Hadfield
Gillian K Hadfield
The problem of harmonizing legal rules across multiple overlapping legal orders is, in part, a problem of knowledge. If the public goal of harmonization is to promote value in transactions and dispute resolution, a legal regime needs institutions that facilitate the production of multijural human capital: expertise about how legal rules interact with each other and with the environment in which economic actors design transactions and dispute processing mechanisms. Because much of this expertise is embedded with the actors involved in transactions and disputes, the production of expertise has to be supported by adequate incentives for private actors to invest …
The Levers Of Legal Design: Institutional Determinants Of The Quality Of Law, Gillian K. Hadfield
The Levers Of Legal Design: Institutional Determinants Of The Quality Of Law, Gillian K. Hadfield
Gillian K Hadfield
In the past decade a comparative law and economics literature has emerged that is largely organized around an effort to explain differences in country economic performance in terms of differences between common law and civil code systems. Assumptions about differences between common law and civil code regimes and the correspondence between legal regimes and judicial behavior are, however, still only weakly based in real institutional features of modern legal systems. In this paper, I examine the institutional determinants of the quality of law developed by a legal regime, drawing on a model from Hadfield (2006) which identifies five key parameters …
The Many Legal Institutions That Support Contractual Commitment, Gillian K. Hadfield
The Many Legal Institutions That Support Contractual Commitment, Gillian K. Hadfield
Gillian K Hadfield
One of the fundamental contributions of transaction cost theory and institutional economics has been to focus attention on opening the "black box" of contract enforcement, drawing attention to the institutions required to achieve effective and low-cost contract enforcement. The idea that the effectiveness of contract law is critical to the growth of economic activity is widespread in the literature on development and transition economies. Recent studies attempting to document toe relative strength of contract enforcement in different settings (La Porta, et al., 19982; Djankov, et al., 2003), however, have focused on relatively abstract notions of "courts" and "legal systems" and …