The “legal origins” scholarship of the past decade has created controversy both in its application of quantitative methods to comparative law and in its claims that common law is better than civil law for economic development. These controversies have unleashed a storm of criticism by...

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...