Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- File Type
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Law and Economics
Libertarian Paternalism, Path Dependence, And Temporary Law, Tom Ginsburg, Jonathan Masur, Richard Mcadams
Libertarian Paternalism, Path Dependence, And Temporary Law, Tom Ginsburg, Jonathan Masur, Richard Mcadams
Tom Ginsburg
The recent wave of behavioral economics has led some theorists to advocate the possibility of “libertarian paternalism,” in which regulators designing institutions permit significant individual choice but nonetheless use default rules to “nudge” cognitively biased individuals toward particular salutary choices. In this article, we add the possibility of a different kind of nudge: temporary law. Temporary law is less intrusive than permanent regulation, and is particularly attractive in situations in which we believe that path dependence has produced the status quo. We illustrate the argument with the example of smoking bans, and provide an empirical case study of an actual …
Why Do Countries Adopt Constitutional Review?, Tom Ginsburg, Mila Versteeg
Why Do Countries Adopt Constitutional Review?, Tom Ginsburg, Mila Versteeg
Tom Ginsburg
The past few decades have witnessed a sweeping trend toward constitutional review. This movement is arguably one of the most important phenomena in late twentieth and early twenty-first century government. Yet the trend poses important puzzles of political economy: Why would self-interested governments willingly constrain themselves by constitutional means? What explains the global move towards judicial supremacy? Though different theories have been proposed, none have been systematically tested against each other using quantitative empirical methods. In this paper we rely on a unique new dataset on constitutional review for 204 countries for the period 1781-2011 to test various theories that …