What Is Law? A Coordination Model of the Characteristics of Legal Order
By Gillian K. Hadfield, Barry R. Weingast. 2012
136 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Legal philosophers have long debated the question, what is law? But few in social science have attempted to explain the phenomenon of legal order. In this article, we build a rational choice model of legal order in an environment that relies exclusively on decentralized enforcement, such as we find in human societies prior to the emergence of the nation state and in many modern settings. We demonstrate that we can support an equilibrium in which wrongful behavior is effectively deterred by exclusively decentralized enforcement, specifically collective punishment. Equilibrium is achieved by an institution that supplies a common logic for classifying behavior as wrongful or not. We argue that several features ordinarily associated with legal order—such as generality, impersonality, open process, and stability—can be explained by the incentive and coordination problems facing collective punishment.
Subfields: Demography, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/098f0a00aef168af4e8a4c73a539a66f82eaba2c
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In Demography
In Safety Research
In Sociology and Political Science
- David Gindis
- Simon Deakin
- Katharina Pistor
- Kainan Huang
- Geoffrey M. Hodgson
- Ulrich Witt
- Christian Cordes
- Thorbjørn Knudsen
Citations in the corpus
- Legal Institutionalism: Capitalism and the Constitutive Role of Law (2017, background): “Consider accounts of the spontaneous emergence of law without the state (Greif 1989, 1993, 1994, 2006, Benson, 1990; Ellickson 1991, Greif et al. 1994, Landa 1994, Hadfield and Weingast 2012).”