Revisiting the Legal Origins Hypothesis: A Brief Review of the Literature

Daniel Oto-Peralías and Diego Romero-Ávila
Additional contact information
Daniel Oto-Peralías: University of St Andrews
Diego Romero-Ávila: Pablo de Olavide University

Chapter Chapter 2 in Legal Traditions, Legal Reforms and Economic Performance, 2017, pp 5-20 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract This chapter describes the foundations of the Legal Origins Theory, some of which are questioned by, among others, Rajan and Zingales (J Financ Econ 69: 5–50, 2003), Klerman et al. (J Legal Anal 3:379–409, 2011), Spamann (Rev Financ Stud 23:467–486, 2010a, J Inst Theor Econ 166:149–165, 2010b) and Oto-Peralías and Romero-Ávila (J Law Econ 57(3):561–628, 2014a, J Money Credit Bank 46(1):43–77, 2014b). Given the important policy implications of these criticisms in the lawmaking sphere—as the common law may not systematically lead to better legal rules and outcomes—, it is crucial to conduct a critical revision of the state of the literature about the Legal Origins Theory as well as to assess the impact of the new evidence from the point of view of legal reforms. Hence, the rest of the chapter categorizes all the criticisms to the Legal Origins Theory into three main blocks. A first set of criticisms builds on colonialism and the associated distribution of legal traditions, another set of criticisms is based on political economy arguments, and a third set is based on the quality and reliability of early indicators of legal rules and outcomes.

Keywords: Literature review; Legal origins theory; Colonialism; Political economy criticisms; Recoding of legal data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:conchp:978-3-319-67041-6_2

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783319670416

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-67041-6_2

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Contributions to Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().