Order without Law?

Trade Without Law: Private-Order Institutions in Mexican California

Trade prospered in absence of law in California during the 1830s and 1840s. Merchants, through intermerchant trade and the partnerships they organized to buy goods abroad, played a central role in trade. This article examines the privateorder institution that facilitated intermerchant trade. The hypothesis is that a particular type of private-order institution, a coalition, governed agency rela...

Order without law? Property rights during the California gold rush

The paper reconsiders the nature of mining districts and property rights during the California gold rush. According to a widely accepted view advanced by Umbeck [Explorations in Economic History 14 (1977) 197; A Theory of Property Rights with Application to the California Gold Rush. Iowa State University Press, Ames, IA, 1981], in the absence of effective legal authority, district codes establi...

French Order Without Order

To account for the semi-free word order of French, Unification Categorial Grammar is extended in two ways. First, verbal valencies are contained in a set rather than in a list. Second, type-raised NP's are described as two-sided functors. The new framework does not overgenerate i.e., it accepts all and only the sentences which are grammatical. This follows partly from the elimination of false l...

Duverger’s Law Without Strategic Voting

Duverger’s Law states that plurality rule in single member districts tends to produce a two-party system. Most formal explanations of this Law rely on strategic voting. In this paper we present a model that yields Duverger’s Law without this assumption. Specifically, we show that even with nonstrategic or “sincere” voters, the strategic decisions of policy-motivated candidates lead to two candi...

Sanctions, Law and Public Order