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In 1991, Bob Ellickson's book about ranchers who raise cattle in an isolated California county launched an important new movement in the legal academy.1 Scholars in this law and social norms movement began asking a series of interesting questions about the role of informal rules governing human relations, largely in an effort to determine whether these norms provide a more efficient structure of governance than formal law.
Law and social norms scholars with empirical inclinations have, for the most part, continued to study the emergence and maintenance of social norms in communities that resemble Shasta County's closeknit group.2 A close-knit group is a network in which power is broadly distributed and information pertinent to informal control circulates easily among network members.3 Typically, close-knit groups are made up of repeat players who can identify one another.
More recently, legal scholars interested in social norms have begun to examine how social norms might arise and be enforced in contexts with more anonymous subjects or fewer repeat players.4 Among these non-close-knit groups, it is important to distinguish between two types. Loose-knit groups are clusters of individuals among whom in
formation pertinent to informal control does not circulate easily. These loose-knit groups are typically composed of members who do not expect to be repeat players or who are unable to gather accurate information about another member's reputation even if repeat-player interactions do occur. Intermediate-knit groups are groups where two conditions are satisfied: (1) a member is not alone, but is proximate to or can be observed by companions with whom he anticipates having repeat interactions, and (2) information pertinent to informal social control flows easily between him and his companions but does not flow easily between him and strangers who are members of the intermediate-knit group. Thus an intermediate-knit group member anticipates having repeat-player interactions with his proximate companions, but not with the strangers who are also members of the group.
In this Essay, I will discuss in general terms what legal scholars might expect to find as we begin looking for social norms "off the ranch." I will suggest that cooperation may be no less rare in loose-- knit groups than in close-knit groups, but that the mechanisms by which cooperative norms arise and are enforced are...