Building Legal Order in Ancient Athens

Carugati, Federica; Hadfield, Gillian K.; Weingast, Barry R.

doi:10.1093/jla/lav003

Cited by 29 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…It may also authorize eventual actions against the one who is found to have violated the convention. Nevertheless, in order to be operational, the assessment by an authoritative steward must be incentive-compatible for enforcers, given the enforcement method (Carugati, Hadfield, & Weingast, 2015).…”

Section: Private Interpretation (No "Authoritative Stewardship")mentioning

confidence: 99%

Spontaneous Norms in Law and Economics: A Sketch Typology

Zdybel

2023

SSRN Journal

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Section: Private Interpretation (No "Authoritative Stewardship")mentioning

confidence: 99%

Spontaneous Norms in Law and Economics: A Sketch Typology

Zdybel

2023

SSRN Journal

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“…First, we can identify many instances of relatively stable legal regimes that exist without relying (exclusively or at all) on the state to supply the penalties for rule violation. We discuss in Hadfield and Weingast () and Carugati, Hadfield, and Weingast (), for example, some canonical examples: medieval Iceland, the world of European medieval merchants, California during the gold rush, and ancient Athens. The international legal order is another critical example—and indeed one that Schauer () discusses, albeit relatively briefly (136, 161–62).…”

Section: Coercionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Ancient Athens, for example, was possibly the first society to transition from social order based on organic social norms, elite rule makers and magistrates, and tyrants to legal order based on neutral, somewhat democratic, institutions . As we argue in Carugati, Hadfield, and Weingast (), this feat required convincing ordinary Athenian citizens to shift from choosing whom to assist in a dispute on the basis of friendship, family, fear, or enmity to choosing on the basis of what the Athenian jury had decided.…”

Section: Coordinationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The problem of developing an account of law and legal order that is not rooted in the institutions of advanced and stable legal regimes is one that my coauthor Barry Weingast and I have explored in a series of recent papers (Hadfield and Weingast , forthcoming see also Carugati, Hadfield, and Weingast ). Our work dovetails in important ways with that of both McAdams and Schauer: our account emphasizes both coercion and coordination as critical elements at work in legal order.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Problem of Social Order: What Should We Count as Law?

Hadfield¹

2017

Law soc. inq.

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In these two fine contributions to the relatively small body of empirically‐grounded theoretical accounts of law, Fred Schauer and Richard McAdams focus on the two key elements of any legal system: the coordination of conduct that individuals have an incentive to engage in if they believe others will also, and the coercive force that is needed to deter conduct when coordination incentives are absent or insufficient. Both contributions deepen our understanding of the dynamics of coordination and coercion. But both also focus primarily on the concept of law as a set of rules generated and enforced exclusively by government. In this comment, drawing on recent work with Barry Weingast, I emphasize the importance of extending the scope of analysis to include settings in which governments are missing or weak and where legal order has not yet been achieved or stabilized—the challenge that faces many poor and developing countries around the world and the challenge that today's advanced legal regimes overcame historically. In our account, coordination and coercion are not substitute mechanisms, but are deeply linked: prior to the establishment of wealthy stable governments (and perhaps even in the presence of such governments), coercive penalties are delivered only if the decentralized application of punishment by ordinary individuals is successfully coordinated and incentivized.

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“…In a recent paper (Carugati, Hadfield and Weingast 2015; see also Carugati 20**) we use a thought experiment in the context of the legal system in Ancient Athens to demonstrate the relationship between decentralized enforcement by ordinary individuals and the legal attributes. 9 During the Classical period (508-322 BCE), Athens possessed a centralized classification institution consisting of a legislative assembly, written laws, unwritten customs, and popular courts.…”

Section: Putting the Private At The Center: The What-is-law Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Privatizing Law: Is Rule of Law an Equilibrium without Private Ordering?

Hadfield

Weingast

2017

SSRN Journal

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Almost all theorizing about law, including the rule of law, begins with government. Analysts from a wide variety of perspectives make this presumption. We contest this presumption. In this paper, we ask whether rule of law is an equilibrium in the absence of private ordering. To address this question, we rely on the what-is-law model of Hadfield and Weingast (2012). Most legal theory has asserted that legal attributes are characteristic of legal orders, such as generality, clarity and neutrality. In contrast, we show that they can be derived from a minimal normative premise about what constitutes law in a setting where all enforcement is decentralized and private. That premise is that anything we want to productively define as law must, at a minimum, have the capacity deliberately to adapt the content of the rules without disrupting equilibrium. We then consider whether a regime that has the capacity deliberately to adapt the content of rules but is not dependent on private enforcement must implement the rule of law in order to secure equilibrium. We argue that it does not. We end with some implications for building rule of law in the poor and developing countries around the world that lack productive legal order.

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Building Legal Order in Ancient Athens

Cited by 29 publications

References 49 publications

Spontaneous Norms in Law and Economics: A Sketch Typology

Spontaneous Norms in Law and Economics: A Sketch Typology

The Problem of Social Order: What Should We Count as Law?

Privatizing Law: Is Rule of Law an Equilibrium without Private Ordering?

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