Although democracy is today the most common form of government, the Law and Economics literature has neglected for a long time the role of social preferences in lawmaking. This article aims at capturing the endogenous process of lawmaking: in democracies, people partly determine the law they...

Rationalism is ‘the stylistic criterion of all respectable politics'. So lamented political philosopher Michael Oakeshott in a series of essays published in the 1940s and 1950s. Rationalism, for Oakeshott, is shorthand for a propensity to prioritise the universal over the local, the uniform...