Social Norms and Legal Design

Bruno Deffains and Claude Fluet

Cahiers de recherche from Centre de recherche sur les risques, les enjeux économiques, et les politiques publiques

Abstract: We consider legal obligations against a background of social norms, e.g., societal norms, profes-sional codes of conduct or business standards. Violations of the law trigger reputational sanctions insofar as they signal non-adherence to underlying norms, raising the issue of the design of offences. When society is only concerned with the trade-off between deterrence and enforcement costs, legal standards defining offences should align on underlying norms so long as the latter are not too deficient. When providing productive information to third parties is also a concern, legal standards should either align on underlying norms with fines that trade off deterrence against the provision of information; or legal standards should be more demanding and enforced with purely symbolic sanctions, e.g., public reprimands. Our analysis has implications for general law enforcement and regulatory policies.

Keywords: : Stigmatization; reputational sanctions; social norms; law enforcement; legal standard; com-pliance; deterrence. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D8 K4 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.crrep.ca/sites/crrep.ca/files/fichier_publications/crrep-2019-02.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Social Norms and Legal Design (2020)
Working Paper: Social Norms and Legal Design (2019)
Working Paper: Social Norms and Legal Design (2015)
Working Paper: Social Norms and Legal Design (2015)
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:lvl:crrecr:1902

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Cahiers de recherche from Centre de recherche sur les risques, les enjeux économiques, et les politiques publiques Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Manuel Paradis ().