Table Of ContentRules for a Flat World
This important book is at once an education and a manifesto. Drawing on
economics, jurisprudence and legal history, Hadfield argues with authority
that our legal institutions are out of step with advances in the digital world.
She calls for greater investment, innovation, and competition in legal services
and, crucially, challenges lawyers and policymakers to think very differently
about the future role of law in society.
Richard Susskind, co-author, The Future of the Professions
Gillian Hadfield’s Rules for a Flat World is a tour de force from an omnivo-
rous intellect. Hadfield moves nimbly between history, sociology, law, and
economics to explain how and why we built our modern legal system, and
how complex changes in the global economy are forcing it to evolve. Hadfield
makes clear that our increasingly wired world requires a new justice system,
and opening the legal system to market-driven innovation is the best way to
get there. Rules for a Flat World is an amazing accomplishment, and anyone
who wants to clearly understand the trends driving change in law and society
should put this book at the top of their reading list.
Colin Rule, Founder and COO, Modria.com,
and former Director of Online Dispute Resolution, eBay and PayPal
The last few decades have witnessed extraordinary growth in complex, effi-
cient and digitized supply chains. These activities create wealth while posing
unprecedented challenges for legal institutions. Modes for enforcing con-
tracts had to change, and governments and private actors continue to exper-
iment with responses to piracy of intellectual property and trade secrets.
Gillian Hadfield brings uncommon clarity, reach, and depth to her analysis
of these trends and their causes. Her important book will open the reader’s
eyes to the legal challenges shaping all the major economies of the world.
Shane Greenstein, MBA Class of 1957 Professor of
Business Administration, Harvard Business School and author,
How the Internet Became Commercial
Gillian Hadfield brings together with remarkable clarity what I have seen
and have struggled with for a long time in many countries, in many envi-
ronments: not only do most justice systems not deliver the value they could
and should, the design and production machine for getting them to deliver
that value is also broken. For the sake of billions of our fellow global citizens
and their aspirations we must open up to using markets more as “problem
solving engines,” in particular in the lower-income countries that are being
told to mirror the models that have been used in the West. This is a must read
for everybody who senses that good legal infrastructure is a prerequisite for
almost everything else.
Sam Muller, CEO, HiiL Innovating Justice
Read Rules for a Flat World – it is your future. Hadfield is our Thomas Paine,
illuminating the imbalances that have led to the emerging revolution in law.
Brilliantly researched, sweeping in scope, Rules for a Flat World not only
exposes the factors behind the “quiet crisis” but lays out a plan for correcting it.
Eddie Hartman, founder and Chief Product Officer, LegalZoom
This book is a must read for anyone who believes the legal system can be
improved or who wants better results from legal services spending. From an
insightful, engaging, and charming exploration of the history of how we came
to have our current legal system, to careful analogies to the transformation
other industries have experienced in the digital age, to a set of prescriptions
for change in the legal system to grow the global economy, Gillian Hadfield
never disappoints. I never expected that I would say about a book on the legal
system, “I couldn’t put it down.”
Mark Chandler, Senior Vice President
and General Counsel, Cisco Systems
Here in Silicon Valley we pride ourselves on producing radical technologi-
cal innovations paying but little attention to the messy but critical legal and
social issues that require equally radical innovation in our legal systems. In
this engrossing book, Hadfield takes us from Athens to modern times to help
set the stage for dealing with the kinds of legal complexities we are now start-
ing to encounter, such as autonomous vehicles governed by machine-learning
algorithms or cloud computing that crosses so many international boundar-
ies that governance issues become almost unfathomable. A fascinating book
for fascinating times.
John Seely Brown, former Chief Scientist, Xerox, and Director,
Xerox PARC; co-author of The Social Life of Information
and The Pragmatic Imagination
A must read if you have ever wondered why law is like it is. Should be com-
pulsory reading for every law student, legal academic, practicing lawyer and
regulator. Read it and be entertained, educated, enlightened and inspired to
reimagine law as the platform for justice and economic development that this
book so skillfully describes.
Rosemary Martin, General Counsel, Vodafone Group Plc
Rules for a Flat
World
Why Humans Invented Law and
How to Reinvent It for a Complex
Global Economy
z
GILLIAN K. HADFIELD
1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
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above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Hadfield, Gillian K. (Gillian Kereldena) author.
Title: Rules for a flat world : why humans invented law and how to reinvent it for a complex global
economy / Gillian Hadfield.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016022372 (print) | LCCN 2016023437 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780199916528 (hardback) | ISBN 9780199916535 (E- book) | ISBN 9780190613693 (E- book)
Subjects: LCSH: Law and economics. | Technology and law. |
Globalization— Economic aspects. | Law reform. | Law— Methodology. |
BISAC: POLITICAL SCIENCE / Globalization. | BUSINESS & ECONOMICS /
Economics / General. | LAW / Legal Profession.
Classification: LCC K487.E3 H335 2016 (print) | LCC K487.E3 (ebook) |
DDC 340/ .115— dc23
LC record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/ 2016022372
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
For my parents Audrey and Colin, who have carved out
unconventional and inspiring lives by always knowing
which rules to break
Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
PART I: Why Did Humans Invent Law?
1. Rethinking What We Mean by Law 17
2. The Invention of Law 29
3. Law and the Dancing Landscape 58
PART II: Global Economic Complexity: What’s Law Got to
Do with It?
4. The Birth of Modern Legal Infrastructure 83
5. Building a Stable Platform for Complexity 105
6. The Flat World 127
7. The Limits of Complexity and the Cost of Law 167
PART III: Harnessing Markets for Legal Innovation
8. Problem- Solving through Markets 199
9. Markets for Lawyers 219
10. Markets for Rules 246
Description:"If you want a simple representation of the twentieth-century economy, picture a large corporation as a box. To do the same for today's economy, though, we need to blow up that box and reassemble the pieces into a network. The network is global, stretching across the planet untethered to political a
