This looks good: Stephen Bainbridge,

This looks good:

Stephen Bainbridge, at ProfessorBainbridge.com points to Order Without Law. How Neighbors Settle Disputes by Robert Ellickson in this post: "Briefly noted"About the book he says,"Robert Ellickson famously studied the way in which residents of Shasta County, California resolved disputes over trespassing cattle. Robert C. Ellickson, Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes (1991). Ellickson found that that “large segments of social life are located and shaped beyond the reach of law.” (4) Most disputes are resolved without resort to law."

The Amazon web page, with table of contents and long extracts is here: Order Without Law. How Neighbors Settle Disputes. This is a Harvard University Press book, the Harvard page on the book says this about it:

"In Order without Law Robert C. Ellickson shows that law is far less important than is generally thought. He demonstrates that people largely govern themselves by means of informal rules-social norms-that develop without the aid of a state or other central coordinator. Integrating the latest scholarship in law, economics, sociology, game theory, and anthropology, Ellickson investigates the uncharted world within which order is successfully achieved without law.

The springboard for Ellickson's theory of norms is his close investigation of a variety of disputes arising from the damage created by escaped cattle in Shasta County, California. In "The Problem of Social Cost" --the most frequently cited article on law--economist Ronald H. Cease depicts farmers and ranchers as bargaining in the shadow of the law while resolving cattle-trespass disputes. Ellickson's field study of this problem refutes many of the behavioral assumptions that underlie Coase's vision, and will add realism to future efforts to apply economic analysis to law.

Drawing examples from a wide variety of social contexts, including whaling grounds, photocopying centers, and landlord-tenant relations, Ellickson explores the interaction between informal and legal rules and the usual domains in which these competing systems are employed. Order without Law firmly grounds its analysis in real-world events, while building a broad theory of how people cooperate to mutual advantage."

The Harvard site also provides the table of contents:

Introduction

Part I. Shasta County

1. Shasta County and Its Cattle Industry
2. The Politics of Cattle Trespass
3. The Resolution of Cattle-Trespass Disputes
4. Who Pays for Boundary Fences?
5. Disputes Arising out of Highway Collisions Involving Livestock
6. The Effects of Closed-Range Ordinances

Part II. A Theory of Norms

7. The System of Social Control

8. Shortcomings of Current Theories of Social Control
9. The Puzzle of Cooperation
10. A Hypothesis of Welfare-Maximizing Norms
11. Substantive Norms: Of Bees, Cattle, and Whales
12. Remedial Norms: Of Carrots and Sticks
13. Procedural and Constitutive Norms: Of Gossip, Ritual, and Hero Worship
14. Controller-Selecting Norms: Of Contracts, Custom, and Photocopies

Part III. The Future of Norms

15. Testing the Content of Norms
16. Conclusions and Implications

Bryan Caplan at George Mason University reviewed the book, here: "Robert C. Ellickson, Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991).".

"...After studying dispute resolution among ranchers and farmers in Shasta County, California, Ellickson came to realize that most people find the costs of learning about the law (judge-made or statutory) and submitting to formal resolution procedures to be so high that it is easier to fall back on common-sense norms. He finds that all three of the functions of law - dispute resolution, rule formation, and enforcement - get supplied by means of these informal norms. Ellickson derives this observation about the importance of informal dispute resolution from "law and society" scholars, but firmly rejects their characteristic disinterest in economic analysis. The frequent use of informal rules is in fact an implication of the Coase Theorem, though one that Coase himself did not recognize. Says Ellickson: "Coase overstates the influence of law. His error lies in his implicit assumption that people can effortlessly learn and enforce their inital legal entitlements, and that they confront transaction costs only when they attempt to bargain from their legal starting positions. In a world of costly information, however, one cannot assume that people will both know and honor law." (p.281) Among law-and-economics scholars, the usual debate is whether transaction costs under bilateral monopoly are high or low: if low, they think that the government should let actors solve problems by bargaining; if high, the government should solve the problems by picking proper laws. What Ellickson points out is that if the transaction costs of learning the law are high, then there is little use for governmental re-molding of the law, since actors will ignore it anyway. Hence, high transaction costs (of learning and using the law) becomes an argument for bargaining rather than governmental solutions to property rights conflict."

(This review is one of a series of short essays posted to Caplan's web page, many of which look promising. Caplan's essays are here: "Armchair Economics")

Dan Ryan has some reading notes on Ellickson's book for his Mills College sociology course, here: "Ellickson Order Without Law a few reading notes...", here: "Chapter 6". and here: "Chapter 7". Herbert Jacob reviews the book at this Barnes and Nobel web site: Order without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes.

"Robert Ellickson has written a fascinating and important book that addresses concerns of political scientists, anthropolo- gists, legal scholars, economists, and sociologists. ORDER WITHOUT LAW analyzes the ways in which cattlemen and their neighbors avoid and settle disputes; it also develops a theoretical framework which seeks to clarify the circumstances under which various kinds of norms will be invoked by disputants.

Ellickson did his research in an unlikely site: Shasta County, California where he found cattlemen living under both open and closed range legal rules. This provided Ellickson a place to examine disputes involving ranchers about liability and fence-tending, for errant cattle have long created problems in locales where ranching is a major activity. Disputes of this sort are also the basis of much theorizing by Ronald Coase and his followers. Ellickson began his research seeking to find how the law affected ranchers' perception of liability for cattle trespass. Much to his surprise, the law plays almost no role in disputes about cattle that wander into neighboring ranches or residential plots nor is it prominent in the ways in which neighbors divide the costs of fence building and maintenance.

These matters, Ellickson discovered, are governed by work-a-day norms of neighborliness. The residents of Shasta County keep an informal ledger of debits and credits. When cattle cause damage, their owners are expected to provide an appropriate remedy -- moving them quickly and making good the damages. Small wrongs are simply entered into the ranchers' mental ledger for repayment in kind at some later time. When fences need to be built or maintained, ranchers reach informal, oral agreements which involve payment in kind rather a contract that compensates in cash for materials or labor provided by a neighbor. Only when cars and trucks hit cattle are more formal processes invoked. Ellickson attributes the use of law in these cases to the involvement of insurance companies, of strangers, and occasionally of large stakes. However, accident cases producing only minor damage are mostly settled informally without litigation.

Why is law so little used where so much law is on the books? Ellickson finds the answer in the host of informal norms governing the lives of ranchers and their neighbors in Shasta County. They employ informal norms, rather than the law, because they constitute a close knit group with many ties to one another. Their mutual obligations and the availability of informal sanctions to enforce them keep almost all follows: residents within the bounds of civility. Being a good neighbor is paramount because these men depend upon one another in myriad ways. Ellickson turns to both a law and economics approach and particularly to game theory to elaborate his theory. People, he argues, seek to minimize "deadweight costs" and transaction costs. Ellickson defines deadweight costs as those greater than the optimal, cooperative solution in a two-person game. He then argues that in almost every instance the employment of informal norms reaches such an outcome..."

This is only about half the review. The text on the Barnes and Nobel site was copied from somewhere else, and lacks paragraphs. Fro readability, I've added paragraph breaks that seem appropriate to this quotation.