Law Commons^™

Most advanced democracies are thick with law and regulation, rules that structure almost all social and economic relationships. Yet ordinary Americans, unlike their peers in other advanced systems, face this law-thick landscape with relatively few legal resources at their disposal. In this chapter, an updated version of Hadfield Higher Demand Lower Supply? A Comparative Assessment of the Legal Resource Landscape for Ordinary Americans (2009), we document what little data exists on the performance of legal markets for non-corporate clients in the U.S. Our results suggest that while the U.S. has nearly twice as many lawyers as comparable countries on a …

In a study that follows in Macaulay's (1963) footsteps, we asked businesses what role formal contract law plays in managing their external relationships. We heard similar answers to the ones Macaulay obtained fifty years ago from smaller companies that described important but non-innovation-oriented external relationships. But we also uncovered an important phenomenon: companies, large and small, that described innovation-oriented external relationships reported making extensive use of formal contracts to plan and manage these relationships. They do not, however, generate these formal contracts in order to secure the benefits of a credible threat of formal contract enforcement. Instead, like Macaulay's original …