TY - JOUR AU - Porta,Rafael La AU - Lopez-de-Silane,Florencio AU - Pop-Eleches,Cristian AU - Shleifer,Andrei TI - The Guarantees of Freedom JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 8759 PY - 2002 Y2 - January 2002 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8759 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8759.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Rafael La Porta Dartmouth College Tuck School 210 Tuck Hall Hanover, NH 03755 Tel: 603/646-3739 E-Mail: rafael.laporta@dartmouth.edu Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes EDHEC Business School 393, Promenade des Anglais BP 3116 06202 Nice Cedex 3 FRANCE Tel: +33 (0) 4 93 18 78 07 Fax: +33 (0) 4 93 18 78 41 E-Mail: Florencio.lopezdesilanes@edhec.edu Cristian Pop-Eleches Columbia University SIPA and Economics Department 1022 International Affairs Building, MC 3308 420 West 118th Street New York, NY 10027 Tel: 212/854-4476 Fax: 212/854-8059 E-Mail: cp2124@columbia.edu Andrei Shleifer Department of Economics Harvard University Littauer Center M-9 Cambridge, MA 02138 Tel: 617/495-5046 Fax: 617/496-1708 E-Mail: ashleifer@harvard.edu AB - Hayek (1960) distinguishes the institutions of English freedom, which guarantee the independence of judges from political interference in the administration of justice, from those of American freedom, which allow judges to restrain law-making powers of the sovereign through constitutional review. We create a data base of constitutional rules in 71 countries that reflect these institutions of English and American freedom, and ask whether these rules predict economic and political freedom in a cross-section of countries. We find that the English institutions of judicial independence are strong predictors of economic freedom and weaker predictors of political freedom. The American institutions of checks and balances are strong predictors of political but not of economic freedom. Judicial independence explains half of the positive effect of common law legal origin on measures of economic freedom. ER -