Almost all theorizing about law, including the rule of law, begins with government. Analysts from a wide variety of perspectives make this presumption. We contest this presumption. In this paper, we ask whether rule of law is an equilibrium in the absence of private ordering. To address this...

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....

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...

Proposals to change the regulatory framework for the legal profession to increase access to legal services have been made for decades. The organized bar frequently responds to these proposals by raising concerns about the difficulty of regulating alternative providers and corporate legal...

Why do successful constitutions have the attributes characteristically associated with the rule of law? Why do constitutions involve public reasoning? And, how is such a system sustained as an equilibrium? In this paper, we adapt the framework in our previous work on “what is law?” to the...

Although most economic and positive political theory presumes the existence of an effective legal regime (protecting property rights or implementing legislative or judicial choices, for example), behavioral social science has devoted little systematic attention to the question of what...

Why is it important for people to agree on and articulate shared reasons for just laws, rather than whatever reasons they personally find compelling? What, if any, practical role does public reason play in liberal democratic politics? We argue that the practical role of public reason can be...

In the last two decades, the economy has undergone fundamental transformation with the twin structural changes of a great increase in the size of global markets and the internet-driven development of a platform for global exchange and work processes. These changes have transformed the economic...

The American Bar Association and its state-level brethren control and regulate the legal profession, determining who can provide legal services, how those providers are trained, and what business forms those providers can use. This professional regulation limits what may be offered as a legal...

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...