These last four countries then exported their common law model to the respective colonies or to those jurisdictions (China, Greece, Japan, Romania, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Turkey), which were never colonized but borrowed their initial legal order from the European codes considered most advanced at the time.
Structurally, the two legal traditions constitute a well-defined bundle of lawmaking and adjudication institutions and operate in quite different ways [Merryman 1969, p. 52, 123–127; Zweigert and Kötz 1998, p. 272].
In a series of influential papers published between 1997 and 2008,[2][1] Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny exploited the exogenous assignment[clarification needed] of these very different institutions and assumed that they have not been reformed later on to provide evidence consistent with the idea that common law is correlated with:"(a) better investor protection, which in turn is associated with improved financial development […], (b) lighter government ownership and regulation, which are in turn associated with less corruption, better functioning labor markets, and smaller unofficial economies, and (c) less formalized and more independent judicial systems, which are in turn associated with more secure property rights and better contract enforcement.
First, historical events in England and in France built into the common law a stronger emphasis on the independence of the judiciary, private ordering, and human capital.
[7] "The former were concerned about the powerful English king’s ability to interfere in adjudication and bargained for trial by local, lay juries, a right enshrined in Magna Carta.
[7] This analysis of the medieval European history has been criticized by Daniel Klerman and Paul Mahoney, who conclude that a system of adjudication by lay juries was initially favored in England because of low literacy levels and later enforced to place the judicial power in the hands of the crown.