Giancarlo Lago (University of Bologna); Carmine Guerriero (University of Bologna); Giacomo Benati (University of Barcelona); Amin Gholami (New York University); Barbara Luppi (Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia); Francesco Parisi (University of Minnesota)
Abstract
To clarify the determinants of the legal tradition, we study the first recorded legal orders recorded in Bronze Age Mesopotamia. We build on the idea that, for non-negligible legal decentralization costs, the mix of uncertain case law and discretionary inquisitorial adjudication can prevail over the bundle of certain statute law and bright-line adversarial adjudication only when special interests are favored, i.e., for a sufficiently autocratic political process and/or sufficiently diverse legal preferences. Consistent with this intuition, the less inclusive political process and rising ethnolinguistic diversity of the Akkadian empire pushed the dominated polities to prefer discretionary inquisitorial adjudication by a local court, who made the law treating her own and the imperial rulings as binding, to lawmaking by an imperial envoy. The latter would have only cared about transfers. Similarly, the culturally homogeneous pre-Akkadian polities and the increasingly interconnected and politically weak post-Akkadian reigns embraced statute law along with bright-line adjudication. Our estimates remain stable across identification strategies and notably, when we control for trade-related legal de-centralization costs and when we instrument the division of the decision-making power with the political instability driven by the presence of young kings in the neighbors and the ethnolinguistic diversity with the climate-driven migration of Northern peoples.