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Josselin, Jean-Michel; Marciano, Alain --- "Introduction: Co-ordinating demand and supply of law: Market forces or state control?" [2003] ELECD 65; in Marciano, Alain; Josselin, Jean-Michel (eds), "From Economic to Legal Competition" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2003)

Book Title: From Economic to Legal Competition

Editor(s): Marciano, Alain; Josselin, Jean-Michel

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781843760061

Section: Chapter 1

Section Title: Introduction: Co-ordinating demand and supply of law: Market forces or state control?

Author(s): Josselin, Jean-Michel; Marciano, Alain

Number of pages: 18

Extract:

1. Introduction: Co-ordinating demand
and supply of law: Market forces or
state control?
Jean-Michel Josselin and Alain Marciano

INTRODUCTION
The idea that competition plays an important role in the provision of law has
gained an indisputable legitimacy among economists. It does not only convey
the acknowledgement of the influence of rules and institutions on economic
competition, but also that governments, when institutional competition is at
stake, or legal producers, in the case of legal competition, are rivals and compete
just like producers of goods and services compete in usual markets. In other
words, if we admit that rules are goods that must be produced (and not simply
discovered by judges), then their provision must be organized according to
market mechanisms. Thus, legal competition, as a decentralized market process
of provision of law in which legal clubs compete, can be contrasted with a
monopolist and centralized lawmaking process, mainly backed up by the coer-
cive power of the State. Even if the contrast between these two models is not so
neat in reality, where practices mix with reasoned arguments, these approaches
nonetheless constitute two theoretical references that allow us to understand and
to model many important situations in which new institutions have to be elabo-
rated. Besides the building of new legal systems in the former communist coun-
tries or the provision of law in cyberspace, the harmonization of law related to
the European integration process is certainly one of the major issues to be
discussed. This is the ...