Dissertation

Building the rule of law: Government design for legal implementation

Thomas, Melissa Annette

1998

Overview

This dissertation challenges the claims of received Madisonianism that constitutions and law can be auto-implementing through separation of powers and checks and balances. Instead, it argues that law is necessarily endogenously implemented, and that this endogenity has broad implications for how we conceive of the importance of law, the link between law and behavior, the possibility of legal and institutional transfer, and the distinction between law and social norms on the one hand, and law in stateless societies and in societies without states on the other. Endogenous legal implementation leads us to conceive of a different systemic view of law, in which actors, not rules, are the subparts, and they interrelate, not through the rules of predicate logic, but by the impact they have on each other's implementation decisions. Investigating Madisonian mechanisms of accountability in the newly democratized Republic of Mali, this dissertation rejects inter-branch equilibrium notions and argue that internal executive policing is at the heart of legal implementation, not just in Mali, but in all three-branch constitutional democracies.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Law / Political science
• ISBN: 9780591853995, 059185399X