The diffusion of constitutional rights

Goderis, Benedikt; Versteeg, Mila

doi:10.1016/j.irle.2014.04.004

Cited by 63 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…We chose to focus on imitation in light of the significant empirical evidence that states frequently copy each others' legal rules, both domestically in the U.S. and internationally [36][37][38][39]. However, it will be important for future work to explore how adding varying degrees of strategic planning affect the outcomes of our model.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Should Law Keep Pace with Society? Relative Update Rates Determine the Co-Evolution of Institutional Punishment and Citizen Contributions to Public Goods

Roithmayr

Isakov

Rand

2015

Games

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Until recently, theorists considering the evolution of human cooperation have paid little attention to institutional punishment, a defining feature of large-scale human societies. Compared to individually-administered punishment, institutional punishment offers a unique potential advantage: the ability to control how quickly legal rules of punishment evolve relative to social behavior that legal punishment regulates. However, at what rate should legal rules evolve relative to society to maximize compliance? We investigate this question by modeling the co-evolution of law and cooperation in a public goods game with centralized punishment. We vary the rate at which States update their legal punishment strategy relative to Citizens' updating of their contribution strategy and observe the effect on Citizen cooperation. We find that when States have unlimited resources, slower State updating lead to more Citizen cooperation: by updating more slowly, States force Citizens to adapt to the legal punishment rules. When States depend on Citizens to finance their punishment activities, however, we find evidence of a 'Goldilocks' effect: optimal compliance is achieved when legal rules evolve at a critical evolutionary rate that is slow enough to force Games 2015, 6 125 citizens to adapt, but fast enough to enable states to quickly respond to outbreaks of citizen lawlessness.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Should Law Keep Pace with Society? Relative Update Rates Determine the Co-Evolution of Institutional Punishment and Citizen Contributions to Public Goods

Roithmayr

Isakov

Rand

2015

Games

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“…Some papers have used the terminology of diffusion to address legal transplants from one legal system to another (Twining 2005, Twining 2006, Shur-Ofry, Fibich et al 2016. Similarly, the diffusion paradigm has been used in explaining: patterns of adopting legal reforms among U.S. states (Walker 1969, Gray 1973) and cities (Lozner 2004); the migration of corporate law norms from one U.S. state to another (Romano 2006) and in different legal traditions (Spamann 2009); the diffusion of constitutional rights among countries (Goderis and Versteeg 2014); the diffusion of consumer protection legislation (Ford 1978) and the diffusion of doctrinal innovations in tort law among different state courts (Graham 2015). However, this research typically takes the legislating state or country as the primary decision-maker.…”

Section: B Diffusion Of Legal Innovationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While this is in some degree relevant to the study of legal transplants between legal systems (for example, through competition between states or countries, see Romano 2006, Goderis andVersteeg 2014), the dynamic effect intensifies when considering the dispersion of a legal innovation within a legal system. As Rampa and Saraceno (2016) have shown, each previous legal adoption has the power to change the legal surroundings and context -for example, by setting new precedents.…”

Section: B Diffusion Of Legal Innovationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recent legal scholarship has studied the diffusion of legal rules from one legal system to another -for example, transplants of institutions between countries, states and courts (Twining 2004, Twining 2005, Romano 2006, Twining 2006, Westbrook 2006, Goderis and Versteeg 2014, Graham 2015. In this paper, we use diffusion models to predict how private attorneys, i.e.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Diffusion of Legal Innovations: The Case of Israeli Class Actions

2017

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractIn law and economics, it is standard to model legal rules as an opportunity structure. The law's subjects maximize expected profit, given these constraints. In such a model, the reaction to legal innovation is immediate. This is not what we observe after class action is introduced into Israeli law. For a long time, the new remedy is almost unused. Then the adoption process gains momentum. We discuss alternative options for theorizing the effect. We find that market entry is not only explained by the available information about profitability, but also by the adoption pattern of others. When deciding whether to bring further claims, law firms also react to the experiences they have made themselves. We thus explain the pattern by individual and social learning, and cannot exclude mere social imitation.

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“…In these cases, ECL can infer diffusion only from the timing of reforms (but see note 17 below). In this spirit, Goderis & Versteeg (2015) showed that constitutional rights in 180 countries after World War II tend to track other countries with the same legal origin, particularly the former colonizer, but also countries with the same religion or aid donor. By contrast, Ginsburg & Versteeg (2014) found no such pattern for the adoption of constitutional review, which correlates only with domestic political developments.…”

Section: Diffusion and Legal Transplantsmentioning

confidence: 99%