COWS IN THE CORN, PIGS IN THE GARDEN, AND THE PROBLEM OF SOCIAL COSTS- HIGH AND LOW LEGAL CULTURES OF THE BRITISH DIASPORA LANDS IN THE 17TH, 18TH, AND 19TH CENTURIES

Economist Ronald Cease's famous theorem regarding the ways that neighb oring property owners bargain ''around'' law and government has been r efined by Robert Ellickson, who studied the ways ranchers and their ra nchette neighbors resolve problems of fencing and animal trespass. Bot h Cease and Ellickson rely on rational actor models of Economic Man in predicting and explaining human behavior and dispute resolution. Both offer animal trespasses as the prime illustrations. Both models are f lawed. Ellickson asked what might one learn by mining historical sourc es to reconstruct ''bargaining'' between ranchers and farmers, but he found the task daunting. In the course of research into the ''high'' ( formal) legal cultures and the ''low'' (informal) legal cultures in th e lands of the British diaspora, 1630-1910, I gathered information on just such interactions (over fencing and animal trespass), and in this article I put Cease's and Ellickson's models to the test of the histo rian's laboratory. While Ellickson's model has significant power in pr edicting the behavior of mature British settlements where the neighbor s were of the same core culture, it is not as effective in predicting dispute resolutions in frontier conditions and is of little use in pre dicting the interactions of Puritans and Algonquins, Pakehas and Maori s.