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Cows in the Corn, Pigs in the Garden, and “the Problem of Social Costs”: “High” and “Low” Legal Cultures of the British Diaspora Lands in the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Peter Karsten
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Abstract

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Economist Ronald Coase's famous theorem regarding the ways that neighboring property owners bargain “around” law and government has been refined by Robert Ellickson, who studied the ways ranchers and their ranchette neighbors resolve problems of fencing and animal trespass. Both Coase and Ellickson rely on rational actor models of Economic Man in predicting and explaining human behavior and dispute resolution. Both offer animal trespasses as the prime illustrations. Both models are flawed.

Ellickson asked what might one learn by mining historical sources to reconstruct “bargaining” between ranchers and farmers, but he found the task daunting.

In the course of research into the “high” (formal) legal cultures and the “low” (informal) legal cultures in the lands of the British diaspora, 1630–1910, I gathered information on just such interactions (over fencing and animal trespass), and in this article I put Coase's and Ellickson's models to the test of the historian's laboratory. While Ellickson's model has significant power in predicting the behavior of mature British settlements where the neighbors were of the same core culture, it is not as effective in predicting dispute resolutions in frontier conditions and is of little use in predicting the interactions of Puritans and Algonquins, Pakehas and Maoris.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , 1998 , pp. 63 - 92
Copyright
Copyright © The Law and Society Association, 1998. All Rights Reserved

Footnotes

The author thanks Werner Troesken, Bruce Kercher, Bronwyn Dalley, Bernard Hibbitts, and the anonymous readers for their critiques, absolving them etc., etc.

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