Legal origin?

Klerman, Daniel M.; Mahoney, Paul G.

doi:10.1016/j.jce.2007.03.007

Cited by 44 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…The standard explanation of the differences between common law and French civil law in particular, and to a lesser extent German law, focus on 17 th -19 th century developments (Merryman 1969, Zweigert and Kotz 1998, Klerman and Mahoney 2007.…”

Section: Revolutionary Explanationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Economic Consequences of Legal Origins

Porta¹,

López-de-Silanes

Shleifer

2008

Journal of Economic Literature

2,680

1,376

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In the last decade, economists have produced a considerable body of research suggesting that the historical origin of a country's laws is highly correlated with a broad range of its legal rules and regulations, as well as with economic outcomes. We summarize this evidence and attempt a unified interpretation. We also address several objections to the empirical claim that legal origins matter. Finally, we assess the implications of this research for economic reform.

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Section: Revolutionary Explanationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Economic Consequences of Legal Origins

Porta¹,

López-de-Silanes

Shleifer

2008

Journal of Economic Literature

2,680

1,376

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“…Even if fascinating, this economic justification of the medieval facts has been proved wrong due to the inaccurate selection of sources. Building on more recent historical accounts (Holt, 1992;Macnair, 1999), Klerman and Mahoney (2007) conclude that a system of adjudication by lay juries was initially favored, in England, due to low literacy levels and later enforced, contrary to Glaeser and Shleifer's (2002) view, in order to place the judicial power in the hands of the crown. 6 Moreover, during the Middle Ages, not only did both French and English judiciaries have de facto power to make law through precedent, but French judges enjoyed a greater independence exactly because their office was a heritable property shielded from the crown.…”

Section: A Historical Common Law Emphasis On Private Ordering?mentioning

confidence: 97%

“…This chapter has discussed the main achievements and failures of the legal origins literature. From a theoretical point of view, the legal origins project has been challenged on two grounds: (1) more careful historical analyses have refuted the medieval-grounded (Klerman and Mahoney, 2007) primacy of common law in protecting private contracting and ordering; (2) consistent with recent evidence (Niblett, Posner and Shleifer, forthcoming), a growing series of models has clarified that the evolutionary efficiency of case law is far from obvious (Gennaioli and Shleifer, 2007a;Anderlini, Felli and Riboni, 2010;Baker and Mezzetti, 2010). On empirical grounds, the evidence on legal origins has been proved inconsistent because of its codification.…”

Section: Conclusion: a New Legal Origins Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Legal traditions and economic performance: theory and evidence

Guerriero¹

2017

Encyclopedia of Law and Economics

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A legal tradition. .. is not a set of rules of law. .. rather it is a set of deeply rooted, historically conditioned attitudes about. .. the proper organization and operation of a legal system. The legal tradition relates the legal system to the culture of which it is a partial expression. (Merryman, 1969, p. 2) 1. Introduction: A Primer on Legal Traditions The law and the economy are profoundly influenced, in much of the world, by either the civil or the common law legal tradition. A legal tradition or origin is a bundle of well-defined institutions governing either the creation of the law or the procedural style of dispute adjudication, and sharing a common "historical background, [a common] characteristic mode of thought in legal matters [and a common] ideology" (Zweigert and Kötz, 1998, p. 68). Common law originated in thirteenth century England, and has been transplanted through colonization to England's ex-colonies. 1 Civil law has its roots in Roman law, and has been imported through the Napoleonic codes to Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal. These last four powers, along with France, spread it to the Near East, Latin America, Northern Africa and Indochina. Structurally the two traditions operate in different ways: while common law accords a key role to precedents and allows more procedural discretion to lower adjudicating courts, civil law relies on legal codes and bright-line adjudication rules (Zweigert and Kötz, 1998). Building on the wide differences between the French civil law and the English common law, 2 Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny (or LLSV) proposed, in two influential papers (LLSV, 1997 and 1998), the idea that the exogenous transplantation process brought not only 144 * I am grateful to Toke Aidt, Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci, and Francesco Parisi for valuable discussions on earlier drafts. 1 These are the United States, Canada, Australia, and many countries in Africa and Asia. 2 While the Austrian and Russian empires designed legal systems that were quite similar to the French, Germany, Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries embraced judge-made law along with bright-line adjudication rules (David et al., 1995). However, this variation is of little relevance because Scandinavian countries did not have colonies and Germany had a strong influence only on China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan.

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“…In addition to being widely influential, this literature has also been widely criticized (Berkowitz, Pistor, and Richard 2003a;Rajan and Zingales 2003;Licht, Goldschmidt, and Schwartz 2005;Roe 2006;Klerman and Mahoney 2007;Roe and Siegel 2009;Spamann 2009a;2010;Bazzi and Clemens 2013). One line of criticism has argued that cross-country differences in economic outcomes are better explained by factors other than legal origins.…”

Section: The Link Between Legal Origins and Legal Substancementioning

confidence: 99%

Do Legal Origins Predict Legal Substance?

2020

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There is a large body of research in economics and law suggesting that the legal origins of a country-that is, whether its legal regime is based on English common law or French, German, or Nordic civil law-profoundly impacts a range of outcomes. However, the exact relationship between legal origins and legal substance has been disputed in the literature, and not fully explored with nuanced legal coding. We revisit this debate while leveraging novel crosscountry datasets that provide detailed coding of two areas of laws: property and antitrust. We find that having shared legal origins strongly predicts whether countries have similar property regimes, but does little to predict whether countries have similar antitrust regimes. Our results suggest that legal origins may be an important predictor of legal substance in well-established legal regimes, but do little to explain substantive variation in more recent areas of law.

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Legal origin?

Cited by 44 publications

References 24 publications

The Economic Consequences of Legal Origins

The Economic Consequences of Legal Origins

Legal traditions and economic performance: theory and evidence

Do Legal Origins Predict Legal Substance?

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