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Article
The Dynamic Quality of Law: The Role of Judicial Incentives and Legal Human Capital in the Adaptation of Law
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (2010)
  • Gillian K Hadfield, University of Southern California Law
Abstract

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. In this paper I look instead at the factors that in‡fluence the quality of law when judges have incentives to promote social welfare but they have limited knowledge about the environment in which law is to be applied. The key insight is that the capacity for a legal regime to generate value-enhancing legal adaptation to local and changing conditions depends on its capacity to generate and implement adequate expertise about the environment in which law is applied. The central mechanism of adaptation is the interaction among three factors: 1) judicial incentives for rule-following and rule-adaptation, 2) litigant incentives for investing in costly evidence and innovative legal argument and 3) the accumulation of shared legal human capital– defi…ned as the sum of litigant investments in evidence and argument– which determines the systemic likelihood of judicial error.

Disciplines
Publication Date
2010
Citation Information
Gillian K Hadfield. "The Dynamic Quality of Law: The Role of Judicial Incentives and Legal Human Capital in the Adaptation of Law" Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization Vol. Forthcoming (2010)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/ghadfield/32/