Recent finance scholarship finds that countries with legal systems based on the common law provide better investor protections and have more developed financial markets than civil law countries. These findings echo Hayek's claims of the superiority of English to French legal institutions. In...

Recent empirical work shows that countries whose legal systems are based on English common law differ systematically from those whose legal systems are based on French civil law. Glaeser and Shleifer (2002) trace this divergence to England's adoption of the jury system and France's adoption of...

The U.S. equity markets have undergone profound changes since the late 20th century. Electronic order books have almost entirely replaced manual floor- and telephone-based trading. New trading venues and order types have proliferated. Technology made these developments possible, but regulation...

Adam Smith is not normally identified as an important figure in law and economics. However, his Lectures on Jurisprudence contain a surprising number of insights that would be repeated by law and economics scholars of the late twentieth century. This essay argues for Smith’s place in law and...