Do Benevolent Rulers Impose Economic Reforms?

Several recent arguments have claimed that various features of Roman law (unavailability of an executory contract of barter; regimes of protection against latent defects and for land title; rules for generic sale) take the shapes they do so as to produce a variety of economic efficiencies. This paper offers two critiques of these accounts. (1) They lack an adequate account of the bounded rationality and motivations of the law-makers. (2) In many cases they misstate the legal rules in question in ways that exaggerate the resulting efficiencies.