In this colorful and consistently engaging work, law and economics
professor Gillian Hadfield picks up where New York Times columnist
Thomas Friedman left off in his influential 2005 book, The World is
Flat. Friedman was focused on the infrastructure of communications
and technology-the new web-based platform that allows business to
follow the hunt for lower costs, higher value and greater
efficiency around the planet seemingly oblivious to the boundaries
of nation states. Hadfield peels back this technological platform
to look at the 'structure that lies beneath'-our legal
infrastructure, the platform of rules about who can do what, when
and how. Often taken for granted, economic growth throughout human
history has depended at least as much on the evolution of new
systems of rules to support ever-more complex modes of cooperation
and trade as it has on technological innovation. When Google rolled
out YouTube in over one hundred countries around the globe
simultaneously, for example, it faced not only the challenges of
technology but also the staggering problem of how to build success
in the context of a bewildering and often conflicting patchwork of
nation-state-based laws and legal systems affecting every aspect of
the business-contract, copyright, encryption, censorship,
advertising and more. Google is not alone. A study presented at the
World Economic Forum in Davos in 2011 found that for global firms,
the number one challenge of the modern economy is increasing
complexity, and the number one source of complexity is law. Today,
even our startups, the engines of economic growth, are global from
Day One. Put simply, the law and legal methods on which we
currently rely have failed to evolve along with technology. They
are increasingly unable to cope with the speed, complexity, and
constant border-crossing of our new globally inter-connected
environment. Our current legal systems are still rooted in the
politics-based nation state platform on which the industrial
revolution was built. Hadfield argues that even though these
systems supported fantastic growth over the past two centuries,
today they are too slow, costly, cumbersome and localized to
support the exponential rise in economic complexity they fostered.
While everything else in the economy strives to become cheaper,
sleeker and faster, our outdated approach to law hampers the
invention of new products, the development of new business models,
the structuring of global supply chains, the management of the
risks posed by complex technologies, the evolution of financial,
ecological, and other systems, as well as the protection of people
and businesses as they and their products travel around the globe.
They also fail to address looming challenges such as global warming
and the reduction of poverty and oppression in the developing
countries that are the backyard of global business. The answer to
our troubles with law, however, is not the one critics usually
reach for-to have less of it. Recognizing that law provides
critical infrastructure for the cooperation and collaboration on
which economic growth is built is the first step, Hadfield argues,
to building a legal environment that does more of what we need it
to do and less of what we don't. Through a sweeping review of first
the invention and then the evolution of law over thousands of years
of human development and the ways in which rule systems have
consistently adapted to higher levels of complexity, Hadfield
stresses that the state-based legal systems governing us today are
not the only way to build the planks of a legal platform. Going
back to fundamentals, she shows how historically, law's primary
purpose has been to help societies to cope with the essential
issues of trust, commitment, risk-allocation, and distribution that
we face in coordinating cooperative ventures. While nation-state
laws will never disappear, the time has come for us to supplement
our legal infrastructure with rules developed on the same global
platform as our economy. Hadfield offers a model for a more market-
and globally-oriented legal system that fosters greater
participation of end-users, market actors, and other
non-governmental entities. Combining an impressive grasp of the
empirical details of economic globalization with an ambitious
re-envisioning of our global legal system, Rules for a Flat World
promises to be a crucial and influential intervention into the
debates surrounding how best to manage the evolving global economy.
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