Bertrand Lemennicier

Marriage contracts and the law-and-economics of marriage: an Austrian perspective

Marriages and firms share many characteristics in common. Both institutions deal with a set of promises between two parties and therefore need contracts to encourage individual parties to stand by their promises and commitments. Despite these similarities, in most countries marriage laws are statutory laws that have little in common with commercial contract laws. We present the Chicago and neoclassical perspectives on law-and-economics, with a special emphasis on marriage laws. According to this framework, it is possible to explain the way traditional marriage laws have regulated exchanges between spouses and spouses in Western countries such as France, when these countries were patriarchal societies. We also consider the case of egalitarian marriage and show some of the limitations of any statutory marriage laws. We then present a critical perspective on the law-and-economics literature on marriage. Our critique is based on the economic literature by Austrian economists and by public choice theorists. We emphasize the knowledge problem, the problem of interest, and the problems associated with government monopoly in coercion. Our concluding section presents some suggestions regarding a legal system inspired from international commercial contract law. By not giving any particular government a monopoly on the power to enforce marriage contracts such system would avoid some of the problems found in the systems of statutory laws currently regulating marriage and divorce in the Western world.

The 2007 French Presidential Election

In his classic essay on democracy, Anthony Downs ~1957! wrote that “the basic determinant of how a nation’s political life develops is the distribution of voters along the political scale.” Adapting the spatial approach of Harold Hotelling ~1929!, Downs’s basic model posits single-peaked voter’s preferences along a unidimensional left–right continuum. The best known part of Downs’s work deals with two-party plurality-based competition. Here, the median voter plays a key role in determining the winner and in shaping the incentives for the structure of party competition by creating centripetal pressures for parties and candidates to modify their platforms to better match the views of the median voter. This unidimensional model can, however, be readily extended to the multiparty case, as