Gillian Hadfield
Chair & Director of Schwartz Reisman Chair in Technology and Society, University of Toronto

Hadfield

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(Wednesday, 21st May 2008)

Title : Legal Design and the Production of Law

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In these lectures, we will examine the problem of how law understood as an economic input is produced.  It is conventional to think of law as the product of the state—enacted by legislatures and regulators and enforced by judges.  Much law, however, is in fact produced by the interplay of the work of judges and lawyers and law can be produced by wholly private actors, much as other economic inputs are. 

In the first lecture, we will explore the process by which law is produced in courts through the interplay of the work of lawyers and judges, both in civil law and common law jurisdictions.
In the second lecture, we will examine the potential for law to be produced by private entities and offered as a product on commercial markets.
Both lectures will focus on how we should think about designing legal institutions to promote economic activity and growth.

Bibliographical references :

Must read reference : Gillian K. Hadfield. "The Levers of Legal Design: Institutional Determinants of the Quality of Law" Journal of Comparative Economics (2008).
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/ghadfield/26

Nicola Gennaioli, Andrei Shleifer, "The Evolution of Common Law", Journal of Political Economy 2007 115:1, 43-68
Available at : http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/511996

Lisa Bernstein, "Private Commercial Law in the Cotton Industry: Creating Cooperation through Rules, Norms, and Institutions", Michigan Law Review, Vol. 99, No. 7 (Jun., 2001), pp. 1724-1790
Available at : http://links.jstor.org/[...]

Gillian K. Hadfield and Eric Talley. "On Public versus Private Provision of Corporate Law" Journal of Law, Economics and Organization 14 (2006): 137-163.
Available at : http://www.ingentaconnect.com/[...]