Legal Centralism

In class today we broke up into groups to dissect passages from the reading. I interpreted “The Legal Centralist Tradition” as such:

The Government was believed to be in charge of rules and enforcement of legal centralism. Hobbes is most known as a legal centralist, Ronald Coase believed that individuals could work out their differences without the aid of a central mediator however he too fell into Hobbes’ thinking and failed “to note that in some contexts initial rights might arise from norms generated through decentralized social processes, rather than from law” (139).

Calabresi notes that the state/government is the center in the order of social hierarchy, that the state is responsible for determining a group’s placement within or outside of society as well as what exposure a group has to goods and services that could bring them closer to the center and which group is ‘entitled’ to those goods.