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Open AccessJournal ArticleDOI

The Illusion of Law: The Legitimating Schemas of Modern Policy and Corporate Law

Ronald Chen, +1 more
- 01 Oct 2004 - 
- Vol. 103, Iss: 1, pp 1-149
TLDR
In this paper, the authors discuss the role of schemas and scripts in the formation and evolution of corporate law and all of modern policy-making, and reveal that all of us are susceptible to schemas that guide our attention and inferences.
Abstract: 
This Article is about some of the schemas and scripts that form and define our lives. It is about the knowledge structures that shape how we view the world and how we understand the limitless information with which we are always confronted. This Article is also about the "evolution of ideas" underlying corporate law and all of modern policymaking. It is about the ways in which schemas and scripts have influenced how policy theorists, policymakers, lawyers, and many others (particularly in the West) understand and approach policymaking generally and corporate law specifically. It is about both the invisibility and blinding effect of those schemas. It is about the battle over those schemas and the prizes of victory. And, finally, it is about how the now-dominant schemas render us the "unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades." We begin our discussion in Part II with the dominant knowledge structures underlying modern policymaking, describing the emergence of what we term the "meta script" of policymaking - or the schemas that frame our approach to policy analysis today. Part III turns to the law regulating large commercial interests - specifically, corporate law - and examines the emergence and dominance of the new "macro script" of corporate law. It examines the schemas that identify and legitimate the purpose of the law. Parts IV and V highlight the signs of illusion in those schemas and then begin to unveil the situational magician behind those illusions. Corporate law works, as all illusions work, by relying on a set of schemas that guide our attention and inferences and play into our intuitions and motives. Yet the outcome and response that this Article suggests is neither so benign nor light-hearted as that of a magic show. While its analysis is concentrated on corporate law, the Article's implications reach each of us, from law student to legal scholar, citizen to policymaker, and reveal something unsettling: all of us are susceptible to schematic sleight-of-hand, tricks that render us vulnerable to dangerous illusion. Where many have heretofore tended to see magic, this Article reveals the illusion of law and some of the unseen mechanisms that make it possible. This project's larger ambition, it should be noted, is not to encourage disillusionment with the purported goals of the law, but to provide insights that help tailor our means and to narrow the gap between our ends and our outcomes.

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Book ChapterDOI

Constitutional Dimensions of the Corporate Person: Corporate Free Speech

Susanna Kim Ripken
TL;DR: For example, the United States Supreme Court has held that corporations are entitled to claim an extensive array of constitutional rights as discussed by the authors, and the justifications for these rights have developed from the many different conceptions of the corporation as a legal, moral, economic, social, and political actor.
Book ChapterDOI

Constitutional Dimensions of the Corporate Person: Corporate Religion and Race

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Book ChapterDOI

The Corporation as a Legally Created Site of Irresponsibility

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Journal ArticleDOI

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- 01 Apr 2021 - 
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that corporate law has become the legal platform upon which is erected a social process impeding society's capacity to lucidly reflect on its primary ends; in this sense, corporate law is in conflict with social autonomy.
Book

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Frequently Asked Questions (12)
Q1. What is the role of dispositionism in the illusion of law?

Dispositionism - which includes the "illusion of choice" and the "illusion of individualism" - plays an integral part in the illusion of law. 

As president, John Kerry will implement regulatory reforms that use market based incentives while protecting the environment and consumers against abuses." 

As one reporter described the Kerry campaign: "Fiscal responsibility and deficit reduction, hallmarks of the Clinton years, are bedrock orthodoxy in the Kerry camp, too . . . . 

His guiding principle when comparing various systems is to study how efficiently all the knowledge and all the information dispersed among individuals and enterprises is utilized. 

Friedman and Smith is a lesson that every political leader should never forget: that when the heavy fist of government becomes too overbearing and intrusive, it stifles the unlimited wealth creation process of a free people operating under a free enterprise system. 

When campaigning for Governor, Schwarzenegger wrote this in the Wall Street Journal:I have often said that the two people who have most profoundly impacted my thinking on economics are Milton Friedman and Adam Smith. 

With interest rates at about half the record high of 1980, nearly two thousand families today will buy new homes, more than at any time in the past four years. 

their success resulted from their effectiveness as de facto spokespeople for the scholars generating the ideas upon which the meta script was based. 

As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestick industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. 

when Lawrence Summers, Harvard University's current President, teaches economics these days, he teaches students that '"the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today . . . is the view that the invisible hand is more powerful than the [ un ]hidden hand. 

If anything, the Chicago School economists simply added to the persuasiveness of the two elements by making more compelling arguments about how markets find and exploit all opportunities for gains to trade and how regulations and their unintended consequences often make matters worse. 

The Academy is of the opinion that von Hayek's analysis of the functional efficiency of different economic systems is one of his most significant contributions to economic research in the broader sense.