The choice at the rulemaking stage to frame a law command either as a rule or as a standard does have implications for the efficient enforcement of law, given that rule-like and standard-like commands imply different sets of costs and benefits for the enforcement authority.
Given the possibility to detect an optimal degree of differentiation of law between the two extremes of rules and standards that minimizes the social costs of enforcement, the paper investigates whether courts, by repeatedly applying law commands over time, engage in a learning effect that lead them to trigger an optimal, judge-made convergence of rules and standards that minimizes the social costs of enforcement, regardless of the initial framing of law. Such investigation is based on the analysis of the concrete application by three different Courts’ systems of one pure rule and one pure standard in the field of tort law. The main results are that, whilst a path of convergence of the pure rule towards an optimal hybrid shape may be observed, a symmetric process on the standard’s side seems not to arise.
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