Document Type
Working Paper
Publication Date
2020
Center/Program
Center on Global Governance
Abstract
There is a large literature in economics and law suggesting that countries’ legal origins – whether a country’s legal regime was based on British common law or German, French, or Nordic civil law – profoundly impact a range of outcomes. However, the exact relationship between legal origins and legal substance has been disputed in the literature, and this relationship has not been fully explored with nuanced legal coding. We revisit this debate while leveraging extensive novel cross-country datasets that provide detailed coding of two areas of laws: property and antitrust. We find that having shared legal origins strongly predicts whether countries have similar property law regimes, but does little to predict whether countries have similar antitrust regimes. Our results suggest that legal origins may be an important predictor of legal substance in well-established legal regimes, but do little to explain substantive variation in newer areas of law.
Recommended Citation
Anu Bradford, Yun-chien Chang, Adam S. Chilton & Nuno Garoupa,
Do Legal Origins Predict Legal Substance?,
The Journal of Law & Economics, forthcoming; George Mason Law & Economics Research Paper No. 20-08; University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper No. 895
(2020).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/2603
Included in
Antitrust and Trade Regulation Commons, Comparative and Foreign Law Commons, Legal History Commons, Property Law and Real Estate Commons