Coordination, Conflict, and the Laws of Time

Coordination, Conflict, and the Laws of Time

Description

The laws of time—the rules and conventions that determine how we organize our calendars and set our clocks—play a central but often underappreciated role in structuring our daily rhythms and social interactions. This chapter explores the evolution of the laws of time across countries and centuries. Drawing from the game-theoretic literature on coordination, we present three models—a pure coordination game, an assurance game, and a “Battle of the Sexes” or “Bach/Stravinsky game”—that capture different aspects of time-related lawmaking. We then apply these models to five case studies: the transition from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in early modern Europe, the emergence of standard railway time in the nineteenth-century United States, the global adoption of Greenwich Mean Time, the century-long struggle over daylight saving time, and the ongoing controversy over “leap seconds.” These case studies elaborate and complicate the game-theoretic models, demonstrating the value and limits of game theory for understanding complex social phenomena. We go on to appraise time's lessons for law and social sciences. We show, for example, how the seemingly neutral laws of time produce non-neutral distributional consequences that reflect, reinforce, and also sometimes subvert political, economic, and military power dynamics. We conclude by comparing the laws of time to more stable regimes governing length, mass, and temperature. While time tells us much about other measures—and other spheres of social relations—we also identify features of time that make it a distinct target for reformers and revolutionaries.

First Page

9

DOI

https://doi.org/10.4337/9781035316762.00007

Source Publication

Research Handbook on Law and Time

Source Editors/Authors

Frank Fagan, Saul Levmore

Publication Date

3-25-2025

Publisher

Edward Elgar Publishing

Coordination, Conflict, and the Laws of Time

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