Legal Regimes and Political Particularism: An Assessment of the "Legal Families" Theory from the Perspectives of Comparative Law and Political Economy

The "legal families" theory of corporate law and ownership structures pioneered by Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny provides one of the most influential accounts of why "law matters" in shaping economic organization and outcomes. However, the empirical bases and theoretical logic of the theory contain serious flaws and limitations. Given these flaws in, and limitations of the legal families theory, the intuitively appealing thesis that law matters must be resituated in a more empirically persuasive and historically sensitive account of the relationship between law and politics. The author speculates that any meaningful correlation between legal origins and economic outcomes is the product of politics in the first instance rather than law, and that legal families likely function as a proxy for different forms of political economic organization.