Social scientists have paid insufficient attention to the role of law in constituting the
economic institutions of capitalism. Part of this neglect emanates for inadequate conceptions
of the nature of law itself. Spontaneous conceptions of law and property rights that downplay
the role of the state are criticized here, because they typically assume relatively small
numbers of agents and underplay the complexity and uncertainty in developed capitalist
systems. In developed capitalist economies, law is sustained through interaction between …