Diffusion of Legal Innovations

The law is permanently under construction. Most legal change is intentional. A legislator, a court, or one of the law's subjects hopes to better achieve a purpose by switching from one rule, one interpretation, or one remedy to the next. Yet empirically, legal innovation tends to be a process that takes time. At the macro level, the diffusion path is often S shaped: It does not start immediately and levels off after a while. This article links legal innovation to diffusion research and discusses micro processes that have the potential to generate the observed diffusion paths.