Research Handbook on Legal Evolution [Introduction]

The societies in the beginning were rudimentary and so were the laws of the societies. Laws have grown with the growth of society. This establishes a relationship between law and society, where law is an instrument of social change, and as Pound would put it law must be stable, but it must not stand still. To comprehend, understand, and appreciate the present legal system adequately, it is necessary to acquire a back-ground knowledge of the course of growth and development of the legal history.

Załuski, W., Bourgeious-Gironde, S., Dyrda, A. (eds.), Research Handbook on Legal Evolution, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2024

The ideas that law is (or can be regarded as) a legal system, and that law evolves over time in adaptation to its context, are two of the most widely shared and presupposed ideas in contemporary legal theory. However, even if much interest has been dedicated in legal theory and legal dogmatics to the evolution of specific legal concepts or institutions, as well as legal norms in particular, not so much attention has been dedicated to the evolution of legal systems in themselves. In this chapter, I will try to offer an overview of the evolution of the concept of legal system and critically analyse whether an evolutionary theory of legal systems-i.e., a theory about the evolution of legal systems-can be reconstructed and laid down for the analysis both of the past, the present, and the future of legal systems.

Review of Law & Economics, 2011

Comparative legal scholarship will benefit from better explanations of legal development. While the complications of legal systems are a challenge for cause and effect stories, evolutionary theory offers a powerful, yet relatively simple, set of explanatory principles that can be appropriately applied to both doctrinal topics and legal systems as a whole. The necessary starting point for an evolutionary analysis is to examine the three core components of evolution: descent, variation, and selection. Engaging these topics and developing good descriptions for each of them for the targeted system can be very helpful in providing good explanations to the “why” questions of comparative law analysis.

Columbia Law Review, 1985

Michigan Law Review, 1983

The Journal of Legal Studies, 2008

Case law develops gradually through the rulings of appellate judges who have heterogeneous preferences but are partially bound by stare decisis. We show that its evolution converges toward more efficient and predictable legal rules. Since statutes do not share this evolutionary property, case law is the best system when the efficient rule is time invariant, even if the legislature is more democratically representative than individual judges are. In the presence of social change, the ideal legal system includes both legislation and judicial decisions as complementary sources of law. Our model thus explains the modern history of common law and the observed crosscountry correlation between legal origins and economic outcomes. It also predicts the gradual convergence of civil law and common law toward a mixed system.

A brief glance at the history of English Legal System in the past ten centuries from birth of common law till-date

Law & Humanities eJournal, 2018

Law involves institutions rooted in the history of a society that evolve in relation to surrounding social, psychological, cultural, economic, political, technological, and ecological influences. Law must be understood naturalistically, historically, and holistically. In my usage, naturalism views humans as social animals with natural traits and requirements, historicism presents law as historical manifestations that change over time, and holism sees law within social surroundings. These insights inform my perspective in A Realistic Theory of Law. This essay, written for a symposium on the book, draws on the notion of emergence to elaborate the implications of naturalism, historicism, and holism for legal theory, further developing ideas sketched in the Conclusion of the book. Emergent phenomena arise in connection with objects or agents whose interactions produce qualitatively new features not found in its constituent parts. Two senses of emergence are contained in this idea: the e...