The legal and economic dimensions of Australian laws, law-making and enforcement bodies will be the focus of a new centre at the University of Queensland.
The Centre for the Legal and Economic Study of Institutions (CLESI) is being established by the University's Faculty of Business, Economics and Law. Under scrutiny will be institutions such as the Australian constitution, other laws, Parliaments, economic bodies and organs of government, such as the police.
Dr Suri Ratnapala, acting head of the University's T. C. Beirne School of Law and nominated Director of the new centre, said CLESI would help redress Australia's conspicuous weakness in this area of research when compared with overseas developments.
He said the study of institutional change had received a major impetus with the emergence of a new global research program concerned with complexity and self-organisation in nature and in cultural systems.
"Researchers in such diverse disciplines as mathematics, theoretical physics, artificial intelligence, economics, law and philosophy are contributing to a dramatic advancement of our knowledge of evolutionary change in complex systems, including institutional change in human society," Dr Ratnapala said.
CLESI is an initiative of Dr Ratnapala and Professor John Foster of the University's of Economics Department. Both have published widely in this field of study.
"It is clear that the types and functions of organisations that arise within the economy are crucially influenced by institutional settings," Dr Ratnapala said.
"Consider, for example, the impact of company law, tax law, trade usage and business ethics. Conversely, institutions themselves are evolving phenomena influenced by the behaviour of organisations and individuals. Hence, the central concerns of CLESI will include the study of organisations and their interaction with institutions."
Dr Ratnapala said CLESI had the potential to serve as a major forum for the cross-pollination of a number of diverse disciplines and the centre was expected to attract historians, philosophers, computer scientists and other scholars with interests in researching institutions.
He said the centre would offer advanced undergraduate and postgraduate course work subjects in such fields as institutional theory, institutional history, constitutional economics and transaction cost economics.
It would also establish a PhD program to attract Australian and overseas research scholars, promote visits by overseas scholars, conduct seminars and conferences, publish research and raise funds to support research.
"At the practical level, granted that the efficiency of legal rules matters, we need to ask what kind of institutions are likely to generate desirable rules," Dr Ratnapala said.
'In other words, we have to study the economic efficiency of higher-order legal institutions including the constitution."
For further information, please contact Dr Suri Ratnapala on (07) 3365 1021 or (07) 3374 0765 after hours.
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