Law, the State, and Private Ordering: Evolutionary Explanations of Institutional Change

Abstract

The societal mega-trends of the past four decades, such as a globalizing economy and an aging society, have challenged the understanding of the state in OECD countries. The resulting “transformations of the state” are the subject of an interdisciplinary research agenda established at the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 597 in Bremen, Germany. A total of twenty projects from political science, law, and economics explore changes of statehood which take place in two different dimensions: first, the internationalization and, second, the privatization of activities and functions which were traditionally performed by and ascribed to the democratic, constitutional and interventionist state. While the first research phase (2003-2006) aimed at founding empirical descriptions of these internationalization and privatization processes, the current phase (2007-2010) is dedicated to explaining the observed changes in statehood. Within this general framework, the authors’ research project on “New Forms of Legal Certainty in Globalized Exchange Processes” deals with changes in the institutional organization of commerce.