Reclothing the Legal Emperor: Justice, Equity, and Governance in the Flat World

Abstract

In Rules for a Flat World, Hadfield delivers a paradigm-shifting wakeup call about law coming up short in today’s world and proposes creating markets for legal rules to enable the development of broad-based legal infrastructure that can meet current and future demand. I am less confident that markets are the preferred pattern for the emperor’s new wardrobe because law hearkens to non-market values. Aspirations to justice and equity lie at the heart of the enterprise of law, and they should be touchstones in transforming law for today’s flat world. Moreover, governance today – beyond the government-based governance generally acknowledged by lawyers – is more flat-world-friendly than we may initially realize, and our quest to transform law should be grounded in the robust and vibrant network of deliberation, policy-development and policy-implementation arrangements, and conflict engagement and resolution that already exists.