Legal Information and the Development of American Law

Further Thinking about the Thoughts of Bob Berring

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Legal Information and the Development of American Law:
Further Thinking about the Thoughts of Bob Berring

Saturday, October 21st, 2006
Boalt Hall School of Law, UC Berkeley

Legal Information as Social Capital

Virginia J. Wise & Frederick Schauer

Existing discussions of the value of legal information tend to focus either on its obvious value for individual practitioners and researchers, or on it value in enabling individual citizens to ensure that government behavior conforms with the requirements of formal written law. Not as widely recognized, however, is the way in which legal information can help foster that variety of horizontal collective initiative that Robert Putnam and others have labeled "social capital." For although the idea of social capital is well-known, less is known about the various mechanisms that can be used to produce it. One of these, although plainly not the only one, is shared knowledge, and especially shared knowledge about government and its operations. Some of this shared knowledge can come from privately-produced "news," but news as we know it is in decline, and in addition is these days is more likely to be a source of partisan discord than an inspiration for collective action. Legal information, however, the written record of society's shared official efforts, can, if widely known, serve as the knowledge base for collective effort and thus as a causal agent for the development of social capital. In this paper we explore how this can happen, and we offer ideas on how the creation and distribution of legal information can be improved so as to enable it even more effectively to be a catalyst for the creation of social capital.