Economic Theory and Legal Change In Russia In the 1920s and the 1990s

Simon Deakin, University of Cambridge, Centre for Business Research, University of Cambridge Faculty of Law, and European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI), and John Hamilton, University of Cambridge, Centre for Business Research, have published Russia's Legal Transitions: Marxist Theory, Neoclassical Economics and the Rule of Law as University of Cambridge Faculty of Law Research Paper No. 42/2015. Here is the abstract.

We review the role of economic theory in shaping the process of legal change in Russia during the two transitions it experienced during the course of the twentieth century: the transition to a socialist economy organised along the lines of state ownership of the means of production in the 1920s, and the transition to a market economy which occurred after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Despite differences in methodology and in policy implications, Marxist theory, dominant in the 1920s, and neoclassical economics, dominant in the 1990s, offered a similarly reductive account of law as subservient to wider economic forces. In both cases, the subordinate place accorded to law undermined the transition process. Although path dependence and history are frequently invoked to explain the limited development of the rule of law in Russia during the 1990s, policy choices driven by a deterministic conception of law and economics also played a role.

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