My research is focused on problems of legal design in market democracies in the context of globalization and innovation. I am currently working on rational choice models to analyze the phenomenon and characteristics of legal order and how to integrate these models with normative theories of law and politics. I continue to work on questions of how the markets for law, lawyers and dispute resolution affect the production of law. This involves questions not only of the price and quality of legal services but also of innovation in the provision of legal goods and services and the provision of the 'soft infrastructure' that supports globalized innovative economic activity. I am particularly interested in thinking about how the existing regulatory structures for law inhibits innovation in law to meet the needs of the new global economy and the potential for more market-based methods of providing legal inputs to support economic growth, democracy and global integration.
Unpublished Papers
Scaffolding: Using Formal Contracts to Build Informal Relations to Support Innovation (with Iva Bozovic) (2012)
In a study that follows in Macaulay’s (1963) footsteps, we asked businesses what role formal...
The Cost of Law: Promoting Access to Justice Through the Corporate Practice of Law (2012)
The U.S. faces a mounting crisis in access to justice. Vast numbers of ordinary Americans...
Endogenous Institutions: Law as a Coordinating Device (with Barry R. Weingast) (2011)
Scholars widely agree that long-term economic growth requires a legal system providing for rule of...
Articles
Democracy, Courts and the Information Order (with Dan Ryan Jr.), European Journal of Sociology (2013)
Conventional wisdom about civil litigation, both among scholars and political actors, holds that abuse of...
Law without the State: Legal Attributes and the Coordination of Decentralized Collective Punishment (with Barry R. Weingast), Journal of Law and Courts (2012)
Most economic and positive political theory presumes the existence of an effective legal regime (protecting...
Legal Infrastructure and the New Economy, I/S Journal of Law and Policy of the Information Society (2012)
In the last two decades, the economy has undergone fundamental transformation with the twin structural...
Rational Reasonableness: Toward a Positive Theory of Public Reason (with Stephen Macedo), Journal of Law and Ethics of Human Rights (2012)
Why is it important for people to agree on and articulate shared reasons for just...
What is Law? A Coordination Model of the Characteristics of Legal Order (with Barry R. Weingast), Journal of Legal Analysis (2012)
Legal philosophers have long debated the question, what is law? But few in social science...
Contributions to Books
Attorney-Client Confidentiality (with Shmuel Leshem), Encyclopedia of Law and Economics (2nd ed.), Vol 10: Procedural Law and Economics (C. Sanchirico, ed.) (2012)
The protection of information generated and shared in attorney-client relationships is a fundamental attribute of...
Producing Law for Innovation, Rules for Growth (2011)
In this contribution to the forthcoming Rules for Growth prepared by the Kauffman Task Force...
The Role of International Law Firms and Multijural Legal Human Capital in the Harmonization of Legal Regimes, Multijuralism: Manifestations, Causes and Consequences (2009)
The problem of harmonizing legal rules across multiple overlapping legal orders is, in part, a...
The Public and the Private in the Provision of Law for Global Transactions, .) Contractual Certainty in International Trade: Empirical Studies and Theoretical Debates on Institutional Support for Global Economic Exchanges (2009)
In this essay, I revisit the public/private divide in order to explore more fully the...
The September 11th Victim Compensation Fund: "An Unprecedented Experiment in American Democracy", The Future of Terrorism Risk Insurance (2005)
One of the profound ironies of September 11 is that an attack widely perceived to...