John O. Haley, Law’s Political Foundations: Rivers, Rifles, Rice, and Religion

Abstract

John Owen Haley’s Law’s Political Foundations represents the culmination of a lifetime of research and thinking on comparative law and legal history, and it is a breathtaking product. The book constructs a theoretical framework of how and why societies develop certain kinds of legal regimes—what Haley calls “public law,” “private law,” and “private ordering”—and then illustrates its central mechanisms through four historical examples. Haley moves effortlessly between sweeping theoretical discussion and detailed empirical narrative, showing a masterful command of multiple academic disciplines and literatures. For the past several decades, comparative legal history has—with only a few exceptions—struggled to identify usable analytical paradigms that...