Lawmaking as an Endogenous Process.

Summary Although democracy is today the most common form of government, the Law and Economics literature has neglected for a long time the role of social preferences in lawmaking. This article aims at capturing the endogenous process of lawmaking: in democracies, people partly determine the law they have to respect. To do so, I construct a theoretical model of lawmaking in democratic countries with three agents: the population, the legislator and the judge. The normative analysis focuses on systems that favor legal stability. The article concludes that the judge’s interpretation power should be higher in the case of sensitive legal fields. I use this framework to derive guidelines for policy-making in the field of copyright infringement.