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Full-Text Articles in Law
On Public Versus Private Provision Of Corporate Law, Gillian Hadfield, Eric Talley
On Public Versus Private Provision Of Corporate Law, Gillian Hadfield, Eric Talley
Gillian K Hadfield
Law in modern market societies serves both democratic and economic functions. In its economic function, law is a service, a means of enhancing the value of transactions and organizations. Yet modern market economies continue to rely on the state, rather than the market, to provide this service. This paper investigates whether private provision of law may be superior to public provision. We look in particular at corporate law, where there is a substantial literature exploring the efficiency implications of "regulatory competition" and compare this competition with market competition between private providers. Drawing from the well-known framework of spatial models of …
Building Legal Order In Ancient Athens, Federica Carugati, Gillian K. Hadfield, Barry Weingast
Building Legal Order In Ancient Athens, Federica Carugati, Gillian K. Hadfield, Barry Weingast
Gillian K Hadfield
How do democratic societies establish and maintain order in ways that are conducive to growth? Contemporary scholarship associates order, democracy, and growth with centralized rule of law institutions. In this article, we test the robustness of modern assumptions by turning to the case of ancient Athens. Democratic Athens was remarkably stable and prosperous, but the ancient city-state never developed extensively centralized rule of law institutions. Drawing on the “what-is-law” account of legal order elaborated by Hadfield and Weingast (2012),we show that Athens’ legal order relied on institutions that achieved common knowledge and incentive compatibility for enforcers in a largely decentralized …