Introduction Letter: Disrupting Law, Reclaiming Justice: A conversation at Creighton on Gillian Hadfield's Rules for a Flat World
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Authors
Strand, Palma Joy
Issue Date
2019-06
Volume
5
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1
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Introduction letter to CJIL 5(1)'s special issue focused on Gilliam Hadfield's book, Rules for a Flat World.|---------------------------------------|OPENING PARAGRAPHS:|Gillian Hadfield’s remarkable book Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy (2017) opens the door to a quantum leap in regulation and cooperation by going back to law’s purpose and first principles. Law’s purpose is to “make it easier for people to work together and make life for all better, not worse.” (Hadfield, 2017, p. 3) Historically, law has helped to create social order by “managing conflicts, facilitating cooperation, and basically making life relatively predictable.” (Hadfield, 2017, p. 5)|Today, however, Hadfield dismisses our current legal infrastructure as boxy, monopolistic, and incapable of adapting to our “rapidly changing world.” (Hadfield, 2017, p. 9) In the face of a fast-paced and interconnected global economy, “we rely too much on centralized planning and not enough on markets to build the components of our legal infrastructure.” (Hadfield, 2017, p. 99) Markets, she asserts, are the vehicle for “[g]etting to smarter regulation.” (Hadfield, 2017, p. 248)|Yet at the same time that sophisticated global business lacks effective regulation, the support that law provides is absent from many local spaces. “Nowhere is innovation in how we think about law more urgent than in the poor and developing countries that are home to over half of the people on the planet.” (Hadfield, 2017, p. 282) While legal infrastructure today is too rigid for some, it is simply unavailable to most of the people who make up the “bottom of the pyramid.”|Hadfield’s conclusion is that our current legal infrastructure doesn’t have what it takes. Moreover, “there’s little incentive for anyone to invest either brains or money in the terrifically challenging task of figuring out how to build better legal infrastructure.” (Hadfield, 2017, p. 8) Lawyers, who have a monopoly on legal infrastructure, pay little attention to legal R&D. “We need to do what we humans have done every time we’ve hit the max on what our existing rule systems can handle in terms of complexity: invent new ways of doing rules.” (Hadfield, 2017, p. 9)
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Creighton University
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Copyright (c) 2019 Creighton Journal of Interdisciplinary Leadership
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2379-9307