Why do successful constitutions have the attributes characteristically associated with the rule of law? Why do constitutions involve public reasoning? And, how is such a system sustained as an equilibrium? In this paper, we adapt the framework in our previous work on “what is law?” to the...

Although most economic and positive political theory presumes the existence of an effective legal regime (protecting property rights or implementing legislative or judicial choices, for example), behavioral social science has devoted little systematic attention to the question of what...

Why is it important for people to agree on and articulate shared reasons for just laws, rather than whatever reasons they personally find compelling? What, if any, practical role does public reason play in liberal democratic politics? We argue that the practical role of public reason can be...

The United States economy is struggling to recover from its worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. After several huge doses of conventional macroeconomic stimulus - deficit-spending and monetary stimulus - policymakers are understandably eager to find innovative no-cost ways of...

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....