Boundary Objects in Private Law

Private law’s purpose is to facilitate people’s design of their own lives and interpersonal relations. Information costs and externalities matter for private law’s achievement of this purpose. But they are not the only features of human interaction that explain private law’s structure. Social norms and expectations matter and indeed help explain why we care about information costs and externalities in the design of private law in the first place. The problem for private law’s aim to facilitate the coordination of people’s lives is that there is no consensus about social norms and expectations. Private law must work for and through different communities of practice and fields of knowledge, both within legal institutions and beyond them, in the absence of normative consensus and shared understandings.
To understand how private law achieves coordination in the absence of consensus, we turn to one of the most successful ideas in sociology: boundary objects. Boundary objects lie at the interfaces between communities of practice and fields of inquiry. They are flexible enough to allow for different uses yet structured enough to provide for common ground and translation, allowing different groups to work together without consensus. Classic examples from the study of science include maps and museums. In the paper, we explore the importance of boundary objects to the structure and operation of private law and then expand the notion further in order to explain legal change.