Bad Law

This paper explores the correspondence between dominant citizens’ values, as observed in two main sets of surveys, and several key features of Spanish law. Relative to comparable European countries, Spaniards show, on average, marked statist and anti-competitive preferences, which arguably favor an idealist conception of legislation as well as a tendency to impose mandatory rules on contractual freedom. To the extent that observed dysfunctions of the legal framework correspond to such values, these could help to explain the failure of repeated attempts to reform the legal framework and the proliferation of legal reforms.