Almost all theorizing about law, including the rule of law, begins with government. Analysts from a wide variety of perspectives make this presumption. We contest this presumption. In this paper, we ask whether rule of law is an equilibrium in the absence of private ordering. To address this...

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...

In this essay, I revisit the public/private divide in order to explore more fully the potential for private production of law in global exchange and also to clarify what I think are differences in the way common law and civil legal scholars think about the public and the private in law