Merchants broke the bonds of localized political constraints during the tenth and eleventh centuries to establish the constitutional foundations of international commercial law as we see it today. The medieval “Law Merchant” was an international legal system that governed without the...

The conflict over scarce resources in the Hobbesian jungle may be avoided if rules of obligation delineating property rights develop along with institutions of governance. One possibility is a “duress contract” as the strongest individual threatens others who agree to enslavement. Thus,...

The Original Constitution of the United States, the Articles of Confederation, was approved in 1781, but within a few years the Articles were replaced by the Constitution of the United States. Approximately seven decades late, the Confederate States of America wrote a constitution using the U.S....

Frank Vibert's book, Europe: A Constitution for the Millennium, draws on constitutional economics to describe how a European constitution should be developed to govern a European political union. Vibert's theoretical constitutional framework is solid, but his analysis has two shortcomings....

James Buchanan advocated the market mechanism for allocating resources because it is based on voluntary exchange. People engage in market transactions only when they believe they benefit from doing so. Buchanan depicted the political process the same way. People engage in collective activities...