Judicial Checks and Balances

By R. La Porta, Florencio Lopez‐de‐Silanes, Cristian Pop-Eleches, A. Shleifer. Journal of Political Economy, 2003

766 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In the Anglo‐American constitutional tradition, judicial checks and balances are often seen as crucial guarantees of freedom. Hayek distinguishes two ways in which the judiciary provides such checks and balances: judicial independence and constitutional review. We create a new database of constitutional rules in 71 countries that reflect these provisions. We find strong support for the proposition that both judicial independence and constitutional review are associated with greater freedom. Consistent with theory, judicial independence accounts for some of the positive effect of common‐law legal origin on measures of economic freedom. The results point to significant benefits of the Anglo‐American system of government for freedom.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/239fb292e41d1a949392817b95321434869287eb

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Citations in the corpus

The Rule of Law and Economic Development (2008, background): “Perhaps the most dynamic body of research on the link between the rule of law and economic development has grown out of a series of important papers by La Porta et al. (1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2004) and their colleagues (Glaeser & Shleifer 2002; Djankov et al. 2002, 2003) on legal origins.”
Understanding Long-Run African Growth: Colonial Institutions or Colonial Education? (2008, background): “Recent studies have done so by employing variables that precede modern economic growth in the developing world, including the legal systems used by colonising powers (La Porta et al., 2004) and settler mortality (Acemoglu et al., 2001).”
The Economic Consequences of Legal Origins (2008, unknown): “The theoretical research on the adaptability of common law has received some empirical support in the work of Beck, DemirgucKunt, and Levine (2003), who show that the acceptability of case law variable from La Porta et al. (2004) captures many of the benefits of common law for financial and other ou”
An Evaluation of Cross-National Measures of Judicial Independence (2014, unknown): “They aggregate information via an index of multiple institutions (e.g., length of tenure and methods of appointment and removal), each of which are believed to create the “right” incentives (e.g., Keith 2002b; Feld and Voigt 2003; La Porta et al. 2004).”
Informal institutions rule: institutional arrangements and economic performance (2009, background): “The rigidity of the constitution quantifies how hard it is to change the constitution by counting the number of steps necessary (La Porta et al. 2004).”
The Role of Finance in Economic Development: Benefits, Risks, and Politics (2011, background): “70 La Porta et al. (2004) and Beck, Demirgüç-Kunt, and Levine (2003b).”