Nathan B. Oman

Commerce, Religion, and the Rule of Law

The rule of law and religion can act as commercial substitutes. Both can create the trust required for material prosperity. The rule of law simplifies social interactions, turning people into formal legal agents and generating a map of society that the state can observe and control, thus credibly committing to the enforcement of the legal rights demanded by impersonal markets. Religion, in contrast, embraces complex social identities. Within these communities, economic actors can monitor and sanction misbehavior. Both approaches have benefits and problems. The rule of law allows for trade among strangers, fostering peaceful pluralism. However, law breeds what Montesquieu called “a certain feeling for exact justice” that crowds out deeper forms of relation. Religious commerce fosters precisely such communities. Religious commerce, however, does not create bridges between strangers as effectively as the formal rule of law. Furthermore, the state tends to be suspicious of tight religious communities, particularly when they are commercially successful.

Contracts and Markets: A Very Short Essay Without Footnotes

Contract law is the quintessential law of a market economy. Strangely enough, however, the idea of markets plays a relatively minor role in contemporary contract law theory. This essay suggests that the purpose of contract law is to sustain markets as a social institution and shows how such a focus on markets qua markets might illuminate discussions of the law of contracts. This essay is only a sketch of an argument. I have kept it deliberately short (16 pages) and free of scholarly apparatus (no footnotes) in order to facilitate reading and feedback.