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The Dynamic Quality Of Law: The Role Of Judicial Incentives And Legal Human Capital In The Adaptation Of Law, Gillian K. Hadfield
The Dynamic Quality Of Law: The Role Of Judicial Incentives And Legal Human Capital In The Adaptation Of Law, Gillian K. Hadfield
Gillian K Hadfield
Much of the existing literature investigating the relationship between legal regimes and economic growth focuses on the agency problem of aligning judicial incentives with social welfare. In this paper I look instead at the factors that influence the quality of law when judges have incentives to promote social welfare but they have limited knowledge about the environment in which law is to be applied. The key insight is that the capacity for a legal regime to generate value-enhancing legal adaptation to local and changing conditions depends on its capacity to generate and implement adequate expertise about the environment in which …
The Strategy Of Methodology: The Virtues Of Being Reductionist For Comparative Law, Gillian K. Hadfield
The Strategy Of Methodology: The Virtues Of Being Reductionist For Comparative Law, Gillian K. Hadfield
Gillian K Hadfield
In this comment I respond to three comments by comparative legal scholars on my paper "Levers of Legal Design: Institutional Determinants of the Quality of Law." In this comment I respond to concerns about the potential for the reductionist methodology employed by economist to illuminate issues in comparative law, particularly in light of commitments in comparative legal scholarship to deep understanding of culture and respect for different legal systems.
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 …