A common argument in the trust literature is that high-trust cultures allow efficient commercial contracts to be shorter, covering fewer contingencies. We take this idea to the topic of social contracts. Specifically, we ask whether social trust affects the length and detail of constitutions....

It is claimed here that the epistemics of constitutional economics has hitherto at best played a minor role but that dwelling on the epistemics might prove useful to understand why the positive branch of constitutional economics is not as far advanced as its normative counterpart. Four possible...