Legal information as social capital

Existing discussions of the value of legal information tend to focus either on its obvious value for individual practitioners and researchers, or on its value in enabling individual citizens to ensure that government behavior conforms with the requirements offormal written law. Not as widely recognized, however, is the way in which legal information can help foster that variety of horizontal collective initiative that is often referred to as social capital. One of the various mechanisms that can be used to produce social capital is shared knowledge, especially shared knowledge about government and its operations. Legal information, the written record of society's shared official efforts, can, if widely known, serve as the knowledge base for collective effort and thus as a causal agentfor the development of social capital. The authors explore how this can happen and offer ideas on how the creation and distribution of legal information can be improved so as to enable it even more effectively to be a catalyst for the creation of social capital.