sufficient experience, but this will have only prospective effect. Moreover,new actions or factual situations the revised law did not contemplate will undoubtedl arise, leaving it once more incomplete A similar argument has been made in the economics literature with regards to contracts: parties to a contract cannot foresee all future contingencies and therefore cannot write a complete contract(Hart 1995). However, parties can renegotiate the contract in the future once new uncertainties have been resolved and thus make the contract highly complete. Law can be regarded as a grand social contract in that it attempts to offer legal guidance for outcomes to future generations of citizens. In countries governed by the rule of law, law is purposefully designed to address a large number of cases and to last for long periods of time. The use of abstract language in statutory law is a means to ensure its generality. Even case law is made not only for he specific case at hand; the courts ruling applies equally to other cases with similar(not necessarily identical) factual basis(Ginsburg 1996). If contractual parties cannot write complete contracts. lawmakers should be even less able to write complete statutory law. In fact, to write a complete law, lawmakers would need not only unlimited foresight, but should be blessed with unbounded rationality. They would need to be able to anticipate the impact of the rules they make on all poter parties concerned and write rules that can achieve the first-best results from a social welfare perspective An important reason why it is difficult to write even fairly complete law is that the meaning and scope of law is continuously challenged by socioeconomic and technological change. In a static world, law can achieve high levels of completeness Take, for example, the development of criminal and tort law until the mid 19 In this essay we focus on publicly held corporations. However, similar conflicts arise in close9 sufficient experience, but this will have only prospective effect. Moreover, new actions or factual situations the revised law did not contemplate will undoubtedly arise, leaving it once more incomplete. A similar argument has been made in the economics literature with regards to contracts: parties to a contract cannot foresee all future contingencies and therefore cannot write a complete contract (Hart 1995). However, parties can renegotiate the contract in the future once new uncertainties have been resolved and thus make the contract highly complete. Law can be regarded as a grand social contract in that it attempts to offer legal guidance for outcomes to future generations of citizens. In countries governed by the rule of law, law is purposefully designed to address a large number of cases and to last for long periods of time. The use of abstract language in statutory law is a means to ensure its generality. Even case law is made not only for the specific case at hand; the court’s ruling applies equally to other cases with a similar (not necessarily identical) factual basis (Ginsburg 1996). If contractual parties cannot write complete contracts, lawmakers should be even less able to write complete statutory law. In fact, to write a complete law, lawmakers would need not only unlimited foresight, but should be blessed with unbounded rationality. They would need to be able to anticipate the impact of the rules they make on all potential parties concerned and write rules that can achieve the first – best results from a social welfare perspective. An important reason why it is difficult to write even fairly complete law is that the meaning and scope of law is continuously challenged by socioeconomic and technological change. In a static world, law can achieve high levels of completeness. Take, for example, the development of criminal and tort law until the mid 19th 5 In this essay we focus on publicly held corporations. However, similar conflicts arise in close