When economists try to measure legal rules and institutions their approach is often a “just do it” one, implicitly assuming that the complexity of the law does not prevent it from being turned into numbers. Many legal academics, by contrast, have the attitude of “just don’t do it,” for...

Law has to be able to respond to new or changing circumstances. This adaptability of the law may be more important than details in the law as such. However, its meaning and its significance have not yet been analysed in detail. Thus, legal adaptability will be examined in this article. It looks...

Law and finance scholars have increasingly relied upon comparative law in the last few years. The work of these scholars has considered, in empirical terms, the effect that legal rules and their enforcement have on financial development in different countries. These studies have routinely...

Ordoliberalism differs from other liberal theories in not supporting the simplistic idea that the ‘government is the problem'. The aim of this chapter is therefore to explain the core features of ordoliberalism and distinguish it from other varieties of liberalism. We also show that...

This paper uses a new quantitative methodology ("numerical comparative law", "leximetrics") in order to answer the questions whether there has been convergence, divergence or persistence of legal rules, and how this relates to the Common Law/Civil Law distinction. It is based on indices for...

In this paper we build a new and meaningful shareholder protection index for five countries and code the development of the law for over three decades. At-tributing and comparing legal differences by numbers is contrary to the tradi-tional way of doing comparative law and the use of a...

This article analyzes how shareholder protection has developed in 20 countries from 1995 to 2005. In contrast to traditional legal research, it draws on a quanti-tative methodology to law ("leximetrics", "numerical comparative law"). Some of its results are that in most countries shareholder...

Inspired by Alan Weisman’s book “The World Without Us” (2007) I analyse the thought experiment of a world in which law professors suddenly vanished. First, without academic teachers legal training would shift back to the legal professions. Purely professional law schools would provide...

In the last two years three important comparative law handbooks have been published (Comparative Law: A Handbook, ed. by Ouml;ruuml;cuuml; and Nelken 2007; The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law, ed. by Reinot;mann and Zimmermann 2006; Elgar Encyclopaedia of Comparative Law, ed. by Smits 2006). The...

This paper uses a new quantitative methodology (quot;numerical comparative lawquot;, quot;leximetricsquot;) in order to answer the questions of whether there has been convergence, divergence or persistence of for shareholder, creditor, and worker protection, and how this development relates to...