Law's Order -- Freedom Book of the Month from Free-Market.Net: The Freedom Network

Law's Order

Freedom Book of the Month for June 2000:
Law's Order: What Economics Has To Do with Law and Why It Matters
by David Friedman
Princeton University Press, 2000, hardcover, 329 pp.
$19.95 from Laissez Faire Books

Beyond polemic is analysis, and that is David Friedman's strength: Analysis of the systems under which we live daily, which shape our lives and our societies.

The inscrutable institutions of economics and law give way to his examination, revealing their structure in a manner that defies conventional understanding.

Friedman's latest, "Law's Order," is a worthwhile addition to his corpus, preceded by "The Machinery of Freedom" and "Hidden Order." In the new book, Friedman asks "What consequences do laws produce in a world in which rational individuals adjust their actions to the legal rules they face?"

This assumption of individual rationality is the hallmark of Friedman's work, and an approach which is sadly lacking in most social analyses outside of the purely economic. As an anarcho-capitalist, Friedman knows that the society he envisions relies on proof of the individual's ability to deal with reality rather than shuffling that job off on a state composed of -- individuals.

In order to produce this proof, Friedman makes a simple claim with large implications: Our law, he says, arises less out of the work of legislatures than of individuals feeding back with rational behavior. Societal behavior operates as a natural governor on the consequences of the legislative process; a polity, like an economy, seeks equilibrium. What we should find in law, if economic principles of analysis are applied to it, is not so much justice as efficiency.

Is the law efficient? Friedman presents arguments that tend to both sides of the question. He examines both statutory and common law, and he subjects both criminal and civil canon to the search for efficiency.

In the end, Friedman doesn't reach a conclusion so much as call into question the assumptions on which our legal systems rest. Like so much of his work, "Law's Order" reveals ... well ... a possible rational order arising from what at first blush seems to be random accretion of law over history.

Interestingly enough, Friedman has chosen to place the entire book on the Web for our perusal. The Web version is less than perfect -- it is rendered in images as opposed to text --but it is well-linked to sources and annotative material in a useful way. You'll still want the print version.