It’s All Relative: Social Movements and Law

Abstract

In Rules for a Flat World, Hadfield focuses on law as created by and comprised of primarily centralized legal institutions. Current insights into law, however, highlight a complexity behind the social movements that cause disruption and lead to real legal change, which creates a new, broader definition of law. Taking Hadfield’s view that law needs to be understood and designed by economists, policymakers, entrepreneurs, business leaders and ordinary people, not just lawyers (Hadfield, 2017), a little further, this paper considers the complexity of social movements in combination with law as part of a more robust definition of law.