Is Law an Economic Contest? French Reactions to the &lt;I&gt;Doing Business&lt;/I&gt; World Bank Reports and Economic Analysis of the Law

Fauvarque-Cosson, Bénédicte; Kerhuel, Anne-Julie

doi:10.5131/ajcl.2008.0024

Cited by 64 publications

(12 citation statements)

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“…The WB explains its goal with this project as creating 'a body of knowledge that will catalyze reforms and help improve the quality of the rules underpinning the activities of the private sector' (WBDB, 2013, p. v). To academics, the DB indictors offer simple quantification and mathematical evaluation methods to use in comparative legal studies (Fauvarque-Cosson and Kerhuel, 2009). To legal practitioners, they offer legible and user-friendly data to make informed recommendations on the legal risks in different countries (Amariles and Mclachlan, 2018).…”

Section: The Politics and Science Of The Tlis And The Db Indicatorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Differentiating and connecting indicators: the quality and performance of law in the World Bank's Doing Business Project

Arslan

2020

International Journal of Law in Context

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Scholars have long argued that transnational legal indicators (TLIs) suffer from significant validity problems. In response to such critiques, the World Bank (WB) reformed its Doing Business (DB) legal indicators in 2014. This paper evaluates two important results of this reform: the WB distinguished between the quality and performance (efficiency) of law indicators and also claimed that they are positively correlated. I argue that this distinction is based on two different utilitarian perspectives; therefore, these indicators try to quantify different aspects of laws. However, new empirical tests indicate that they are not correlated. The statistical tests on the DB Resolving Insolvency Indicators do not show any strong correlation, and the case of Turkey's WB-led insolvency-law reform suggests that the developing countries can even incur efficiency losses from legal-quality improvements. Thus, this study demonstrates that the 2014 DB reform reproduced the validity problems inside the new distinctions and connections between its indicators, potentially creating new misconceptions for policy-makers.

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Section: The Politics and Science Of The Tlis And The Db Indicatorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Differentiating and connecting indicators: the quality and performance of law in the World Bank's Doing Business Project

Arslan

2020

International Journal of Law in Context

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“…Research in legal sociology and law and society continued to invoke evolution in efforts to construct reliable indices, legal or otherwise, in the ontogeny of 'society,' with individual societies understood as instances of a single kind of entity in different stages of development. 108 Habermas's social theory likewise provided an account of social evolution that subsumed continuous changes in both social structure and worldview into a developmental logic with a built-in sense of normative progress, thereby rehashing Spencer's historicism while seeking to vindicate a breed of Kantian historical rationalism. 109 For the most part, though, 'evolution' was little more than a minor theme in legal scholarship.…”

Section: A Scientific Turn For Legal Evolution: Naturalism Mechmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…107 See Campbell (n 101) 23-26. 108 For sociology of law, see eg Schwarz and Miller, who understand 'evolution' as movement through a sequence of changes undergone by all societies. Richard D Schwartz and James C Miller, 'Legal Evolution and Societal Complexity' (1964) made by Armen Alchian, sought to characterize the prevailing structure of business organizations as an evolutionary outcome of market competition.…”

Section: A Scientific Turn For Legal Evolution: Naturalism Mechmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Limits of Legal Evolution: Knowledge and Normativity in Theories of Legal Change

McHugh-Russell

2019

SSRN Journal

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Over the last forty years, legal theory and policy advice have come to draw heavily from an 'evolutionary' jurisprudence that explains legal transformation by drawing inspiration from the theoretical successes of Darwinian natural selection. This project seeks to enrich and critique this tradition using an analytical perspective that emphasizes the material consequences of concepts and ideas. Existing theories of legal evolution depend on a positivist epistemology that strictly distinguishes the objects of social life-interests, institutions, systems-from knowledge about those objects. My dissertation explores how knowledge, and especially non-legal expertise, acts as an independent site and locus of transformation, mediating the interaction between law and social phenomena and acting as a catalyst of legal innovation. Prior work by Simon Deakin has integrated insights from systems theory to show how the interaction between law and economic institutions can only be properly understood by attending to the epistemic frame law uses to interpret economic practice. Using a case study on the impact of 'law and finance' literature on World Bank policy advice and, consequentially, on legal reforms adopted by many developing countries between 2000 and the present, I show that such attention to legal knowledge is inadequate. The case points, first, to the contingency of the intellectual tools used to understand legal institutions. Rather than deploying a determinate rationality, private and public actors address legal, economic, and ethical problems using a variety of paradigms: viewpoints are not determined by realities. More fundamentally, the cases suggest that successful paradigms, rather than economic or political realities alone, shape the dynamics of socio-legal change. My conclusions address some normative questions that arise when researchers in a social scientific mode are implicated in the processes they seek to document. ed, Cambridge University Press 1995). The idea is traceable at least as far back as Hobbes: 'The law of such a society thus consisted of the commands of whoever was sovereign in that society. If law is the product of the human will, the process of legal change is simple. The sovereign decides to issue a new rule to replace the old rule; he has changed his mind.' Peter Stein, Legal Evolution: The Story of an Idea (Cambridge University Press 1980) 2. The modern inheritor of this strain of thinking about law, at least in the Anglo-American legal tradition, is HLA Hart. Hart's account of law is richer than Austin's. He does not traffic in the fiction that valid law can be identified with the will of a sovereign. He does nonetheless identify law with valid norms issued by a state-backed law-making authority, from which it follows that changes to law are definable as changes to those norms. Hart's seminal contribution to the positivist tradition is HLA Hart, The Concept of Law (Clarendon Press 1972).

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“…This type of information becomes relevant to policy and decision-making, and calls on states to implement, often dubious, legal reforms should they wish to attract FDI. As Fauvarque-Cosson and Kerhuel put it, this approach transforms law into an ‘economic contest’ (2009, p. 811), where it is treated as a commodity competing for the attention of foreign investors (Perry-Kessaries, 2011, p. 402).…”

Section: Incentives As Stimulus For Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Supping with the Devil? Indicators and the rise of managerial rationality in law

Amariles

2017

International Journal of Law in Context

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Managerial devices are rapidly developing as a means for driving the legal performance of organisations, including those of states and corporations. This paper explores the managerial rationality underpinning global legal indicators, and the constraints they convey on institutional behaviour. In particular, it argues that indicators are better understood as part of a system of management control and distributed governance, which is steadily eroding state-centred forms of authority, including state law. In this context, legitimacy and reactivity are contingent to their cycle of production and implementation, which is fourfold: data-collecting, benchmarking, auditing and allocating incentives. Each process is meant to generate respectively subjectification, self-knowledge by comparison, accountability and stimulus for action. Indicators with higher degrees of legitimacy become entrenched in institutional practices and legal decision-making processes. The paper concludes that regulatory spaces where indicators unfold need critical and political scrutiny to expose their pernicious effects, undesirable uses and inevitable misuses.

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Is Law an Economic Contest? French Reactions to the <I>Doing Business</I> World Bank Reports and Economic Analysis of the Law

Cited by 64 publications

References 0 publications

Differentiating and connecting indicators: the quality and performance of law in the World Bank's Doing Business Project

Differentiating and connecting indicators: the quality and performance of law in the World Bank's Doing Business Project

The Limits of Legal Evolution: Knowledge and Normativity in Theories of Legal Change

Supping with the Devil? Indicators and the rise of managerial rationality in law

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