Most social scientists take for granted that law is defined by the presence of a centralized authority capable of exacting coercive penalties for violations of legal rules. Moreover, the existing approach to analyzing law in economics and positive political theory works with a very thin concept of law that does not account for the distinctive attributes of legal order as compared with other forms of social order. Drawing on a model developed elsewhere, we reinterpret key case studies to demonstrate how a theoretically informed approach illuminates questions about the emergence, stability, and function of law in supporting economic and democratic growth.

We argue that actors can attempt to shield their policy choices from unfavorable review by crafting them in a manner that will increase the costs necessary for supervisory institutions to review them. We apply this theory to the US Supreme Court and demonstrate how justices strategically obfuscate the language of majority opinions in the attempt to circumvent unfavorable review from a politically hostile Congress. The results suggest that Supreme Court justices can and do alter the language of their opinions to raise the costs of legislative review and thereby protect their decisions.

The article focuses on judicial politics in three international regimes. The courts of these regimes are trustee courts, operating in an environment of judicial supremacy with respect to states. An international trustee court meets three criteria: (1) the court is the authoritative interpreter of the regime’s law; (2) the court’s jurisdiction is compulsory; and (3) it is virtually impossible, in practice, for contracting states to reverse the court’s important rulings. After developing a theory of trusteeship, we turn to how judges have used their powers. Although there is variation, each court has engaged in “majoritarian activism,” producing law that reflects standard practices or a high degree of state consensus but that would not have been adopted by states under unanimity decision rules. Majoritarian activism helps judges to develop the law progressively, to mitigate potential legitimacy problems, and to render efforts at curbing the growth of their authority improbable or ineffective.

This article probes explanations for the linkages between Supreme Court justices’ broad ideological stances and their positions in specific issue areas. The justices’ votes in decisions on the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment showed no consistent ideological pattern in the 1937–79 terms but have fallen along clear ideological lines since then. Analysis of relevant evidence indicates that this shift reflected both changes in the content of takings cases and changes in the lineup of political and social groups on takings issues. The shift and its sources suggest a need to rethink the role of the justices’ policy preferences in shaping their choices.

This article presents an empirical study of statutory interpretation. Respondents were asked to read statutes and answer questions about how they should be applied to simple cases. The results suggest, first, that it is difficult to separate judgments about the linguistic meaning of a statute from policy preferences about it. Different ways of framing the interpretive question have consequences, however; asking how an ordinary reader would interpret a text helps produce answers that are distinct from a respondent’s own preferences about it. The article considers why this might be so and discusses implications for the interpretation of statutes by courts.

This article outlines an effort to gauge cross-national and intertemporal differences in law-based orders for 165 nations from 1850 to 2010. Despite the increasing importance attributed to “the rule of law,” there have been few efforts to develop objective measures of it. The conceptual foundations for this effort rest on a review of centuries of scholarship concerning the societal utility of law. Data are drawn from a variety of sources to create two composite measures. The derivation of these measures is reported and the measures are examined to determine whether they present reinforcing profiles of a country's legal order.