‘What is Law? A Coordination Model of the Characteristics of Legal Order,’ by Gillian Hadfield and Barry Weingast
“What Is Law? A Coordination Model of the Characteristics of Legal Order” by Gillian K. Hadfield and Barry R. Weingast asks whether legal order requires a centralized enforcement agency. The paper argues it does not. It presents a model in which a system of decentralized enforcement, carried out collectively by individual agents, sustains legal order. The article is part of the authors’ broader project to decouple law from the state and to show that the former does not conceptually depend on the latter (see, e.g., Hadfield & Weingast, 2013; Hadfield & Weingast, 2018).
Hadfield and Weingast’s central thesis is that the defining characteristics of legal order do not conceptually depend on centralized, coercive state enforcement. Legal order instead emerges as a coordination equilibrium sustained by decentralized collective punishment, so long as a shared institution provides authoritative, publicly knowable classifications of wrongful conduct. On this view, law functions as a coordination technology. Its core function is not to command through force, but to align expectations.
Methodologically, the paper offers a piece of foundational law & economics modeling. Rather than evaluate the efficiency of particular legal rules, Hadfield and Weingast adopt a rational-choice framework to explain the emergence of legal order itself. They rely on standard tools—repeated games, belief updating, and equilibrium analysis—but deploy them at a highly abstract institutional level. The aim is not empirical prediction, but an existence proof: to show that legal order with rule-of-law characteristics can, in principle, arise without centralized enforcement.
The paper proceeds in three steps. First, the authors construct a formal repeated-game model in which enforcement is entirely decentralized and individual agents hold heterogeneous, private views about what counts as wrongful behavior. Second, they show that an equilibrium with effective deterrence can still be sustained if a third-party institution supplies a common logic for classifying conduct, even though that institution lacks enforcement power. Finally, they demonstrate that the institutional features required for this equilibrium—generality, impersonality, stability, openness, and publicity—closely mirror the attributes traditionally associated with the rule of law.