Producing Law for Innovation

In this chapter, I first discuss why we need to think of legal infrastructure as economic infrastructure requiring focused economic policymaking, what is wrong with our existing legal infrastructure and why we need to change our modes of legal production. I then set out a vision of what greater reliance on market-based production of legal infrastructure could look like. Finally, I suggest some concrete steps that policymakers can take to move us toward a more open, competitive system of legal production. These include 1) opening up access to the provision of legal services, such as by establishing a federal licensing regime that exempts providers from state-based regulation by the bar and state supreme courts and reduces restrictions on the ownership and management of legal providers; 2) establishing the public law framework necessary to enable the emergence of competitive private legal entities to supply legal rules (for corporate governance and commercial contracting, for example); and 3) reducing barriers to international trade in legal services