Some Readings Suggested by Law Society Observers:

Robert C. Ellickson, Order without Law, How Neighbors Settle Disputes (1991)

Edward Castranova, "Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier," CESifo Working Paper No. 618 (2001) < http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=294828 >. Ed is an economics professor at Cal State, Fullerton.

F. Gregory Lastowka & Dan Hunter, "The Laws of Virtual Worlds," < http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=402860 > (2003). Greg is an attorney in Philadelphia, Dan is an assistant professor of legal studies at Wharton.

Jack M. Balkin, "Virtual Liberty, Freedom to Design and Freedom to Play in Virtual Worlds," 90 Virginia Law Review 2043 (2004)< http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/jbalkin/...al_liberty1.pdf <http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/jbalkin/articles/virtual_liberty1.pdf > Jack is Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and First Amendment and the Director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.

James Grimmelmann, "Virtual Worlds as Comparative Law," 49 New York Law School Law Review 147 (2004)< http://www.nyls.edu/pdfs/v49n1p147-184.pdf >James received his J.D. from Yale Law in 2005, was very active in the Information Society Project there, and is a prolific legal writer.

Fairfield, Joshua, "Virtual Property" 85 Boston University Law Review ____, (2005) <http://ssrn.com/abstract=807966>


RFC:
What readings would you add to this list?
Which of them did you find more useful than others?

Beth Simone Noveck, "A democracy of groups", http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_11/noveck/. Beth is Associate Professor and Director of the Institute for Information Law and Policy and the Democracy Design Workshop at the New York Law School. Beth is with the Democracy Island project in SL.

For those interested in exploring the tension between competition and cooperation, I suggest two seminal works:

Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene (1976), in which Prof. Dawkins explained his valuable concepts of "Kinship Theory" and "Reciprocity Theory," by which groups of kinfolk (individual organisms related by DNA or common circumstances) tend to cluster together and tend to behave altruistically toward each other. By so doing, they tend to support their kinship group (colony, tribe, flock, swarm, school, whatever) in its competition with other groups and organisms for limited resources.

Robert Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation (1984), in which Prof. Axelrod proposed a theory by which cooperation evolved, based upon his "investigation of individuals who pursue their own self-interest without the aid of a central authority to force them to cooperate with each other." Axelrod found that this cooperation evolved not only in sentient beings, but in animals, even microorganisms, and concluded that the phenomenon is independent of thought and altruism, but a characteristic of the mathematics of game theory.

His theory has been further developed by others since then along the lines that cooperation evolves as a response to the need to compete or fail. Once you get your head around that seeming contradiction, you're prepared to start a thoughtful consideration of how cooperation and competition feed on each other.

Soon, you'll be ready for Schumpeterian Creative Destruction and maybe Clayton Christensen. But that's another story.