IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cii/cepidt/2021-08.html

The Impact of Common Law on the Volume of Legal Services: An International Study

Author

Listed:
  • Enzo Dia
  • Jacques Melitz

Abstract

We show that the heavy use of legal services relative to output in the US is not a peculiarity of the country but applies to common law countries in general. It stems largely from better ability to contract and easier access to justice. Yet in close association, common law also opens significantly more room for rentseeking by lawyers than civil law. Thereby the costs could outweigh the benefits. Both real GDP per capita and openness emerge as further factors making room for lawyers.

Suggested Citation

  • Enzo Dia & Jacques Melitz, 2021. "The Impact of Common Law on the Volume of Legal Services: An International Study," Working Papers 2021-08, CEPII research center.
    • Handle: RePEc:cii:cepidt:2021-08
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.cepii.fr/PDF_PUB/wp/2021/wp2021-08.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Enzo Dia & Jacques Melitz, 2024. "The impact of common law on the volume of legal services: An international study," Economics of Transition and Institutional Change, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 32(1), pages 265-297, January.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • K15 - Law and Economics - - Basic Areas of Law - - - Civil Law; Common Law
    • K00 - Law and Economics - - General - - - General (including Data Sources and Description)

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cii:cepidt:2021-08. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cepiifr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.