Most advanced democracies are thick with law and regulation, rules that structure almost all social and economic relationships. Yet ordinary Americans, unlike their peers in other advanced systems, face this law-thick landscape with relatively few legal resources at their disposal. In this...

How do democratic societies establish and maintain order in ways that are conducive to growth? Contemporary scholarship associates order, democracy, and growth with centralized rule of law institutions. In this article, we test the robustness of modern assumptions by turning to the case of...

The vast majority of ordinary Americans lack any real access to courts as they struggle to navigate a world that is increasingly shaped by legal rules and obligations. Often this means simply forgoing legal rights and entitlements or giving up in the face of claims of wrongdoing. Among those who...

Almost all theorizing about law begins with government. In a series of papers we challenge this orthodoxy. Our “what-is-law” approach places private enforcement at the center of a theory of law. The critical public component that distinguishes legal from social order is not public...

We suggest that the analysis of incomplete contracting developed by law and economics researchers can provide a useful framework for understanding the AI alignment problem and help to generate a systematic approach to finding solutions. We first provide an overview of the incomplete contracting...

Much of the existing literature investigating the relationship between legal regimes and economic growth focuses on the agency problem of aligning judicial incentives with social welfare and is relatively free of institutional detail beyond abstractions about common law and civil code regimes....

Multijuralism is a fundamental attribute of the globalizing world, not merely as a result of the public creation of multijural states or trading zones, but also as a result of privately generated multi-jurisdictional transactions and relationships. Both public and private rule-making are...