Economic and legal institutionalism: What can they learn from each other?

The main argument of this paper is that both constitutional political economy and institutional legal theory can benefit from adopting certain central notions from each other. On the one hand, the legal notion of validity can help to clarify certain obscurities concerning the mode of existence of institutions in constitutional political economy. On the other hand, the economic notion of voluntary choice can serve as a point of departure for institutional legal theory in developing substantive criteria for the evaluation of legal systems without appealing to natural law ideas. The author wishes to thank Bob Lieshout and Bernard Steunenberg for their comments.