0000000000628190
AUTHOR
Bruno Deffains
showing 3 related works from this author
On the Role of Inequalities in Legal Systems: A Tocquevilian View
2008
The present paper proposes to interpret the differences in legal systems between common-law and civil-law nations as arising from the importance given to adjudication in comparison with statute laws. It focuses on the relative costs of legal change by adjudication (case law development) when compared with legislation (statutory law development). The main argument is that the public concern with equality is a major determinant of the relative cost of adjudication in a legal system. We develop a model of the legal process that illustrates Tocqueville's fundamental intuition with regard to the uniformity of legal rules, and as a consequences, the relative importance of adjudication and legisla…
State Capacity, Legal Design and the Venality of Judicial Offices
2020
We develop a model of venal judicial offices, i.e., sales of public positions in the judicial sector, which were used extensively in France (and many other European countries) during the 17th and 18th centuries, and which led to vastly improved French State capacity despite limited opportunities to raise taxes and to borrow. In this model, venality provides financial resources for the ruler, at the cost of less control over judicial decisions. We rely on this model to provide an analytic narrative of the rise and the decline of venality in Old Regime France.
On Legal Cooperation and the Dynamics of Legal Convergence
2010
In this paper, we study the dynamics of legal convergence and the comparison between the different instruments of legal convergence based on cooperative strategies (i.e., harmonization and unification) or not. To study these questions we use a model with two nation-states which is inspired in part by that used in Carbonara and Parisi (2008) where preferences of each nation-state are such that it is costly to change the law, but it is also costly to have a different legal system from the other nation-state. We show that legal unification could be achieved in the long-run through small step by step changes despite the existence of huge harmonization costs in the short run. We also show that l…