Much of the existing literature investigating the relationship between legal regimes and economic growth focuses on the agency problem of aligning judicial incentives with social welfare and is relatively free of institutional detail beyond abstractions about common law and civil code regimes....

How do democratic societies establish and maintain order in ways that are conducive to growth? Contemporary scholarship associates order, democracy, and growth with centralized rule of law institutions. In this article, we test the robustness of modern assumptions by turning to the case of...

Almost all theorizing about law begins with government. In a series of papers we challenge this orthodoxy. Our “what-is-law” approach places private enforcement at the center of a theory of law. The critical public component that distinguishes legal from social order is not public...