Microfoundations of the Rule of Law
Forthcoming, Annual Review of Political Science
Stanford Law and Economics Olin Working Paper No. 453
50 Pages Posted: 23 Oct 2013 Last revised: 21 Dec 2013
There are 2 versions of this paper
Microfoundations of the Rule of Law
Microfoundations of the Rule of Law
Date Written: November 7, 2013
Abstract
Many social scientists rely on the rule of law in their accounts of political or economic development. Many however simply equate law with a stable government capable of enforcing the rules generated by a political authority. As two decades of largely failed efforts to build the rule of law in poor and transition countries and continuing struggles to build international legal order demonstrate, we still do not understand how legal order is produced, especially in places where it does not already exist. We here canvas literature in the social sciences to identify the themes and gaps in the existing accounts. We conclude that this literature has failed to produce a microfoundational account of the phenomenon of legal order. We then discuss our recent effort to develop the missing microfoundations of legal order to provide a better framework for future work on the rule of law.
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