IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/conchp/978-3-319-67041-6_2.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

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

In: Legal Traditions, Legal Reforms and Economic Performance

Author

Listed:
  • Daniel Oto-Peralías

    (University of St Andrews)

  • Diego Romero-Ávila

    (Pablo de Olavide University)

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Daniel Oto-Peralías & Diego Romero-Ávila, 2017. "Revisiting the Legal Origins Hypothesis: A Brief Review of the Literature," Contributions to Economics, in: Legal Traditions, Legal Reforms and Economic Performance, chapter 0, pages 5-20, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:conchp:978-3-319-67041-6_2
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-67041-6_2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:conchp:978-3-319-67041-6_2. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.