Five Uneasy Pieces

de Ronald Schnitker, Dick van 't Kaar, Jan M. Smits

Can the law benefit from an evolutionary perspective? This little book shows how the idea of survival of the fittest can help explain legal development and the rise and fall of legal institutions. The reader is invited to join in on a journey of discovery in which the world of Darwin is connected to the topics of legal change, convergence of law, legal complexity, law in hip-hop music and the adoption of the price-payment rule. Exploring these five themes from an evolutionary angle indisputably upsets our traditional view of the law, but it does fit the author's view of academia as a place for cross-disciplinary research steered by curiosity.