I’ve been thinking a lot lately about trust, specifically about when and whether governments should trust their citizens to do the right thing. My longtime collaborator, Yuval Feldman’s brilliant new book, Can the Public Be Trusted? The Promise and Perils of Voluntary Compliance, which came out
just now from CUP in an open access format, tackles this question head-on, but what makes it so valuable is how it flips the usual regulatory inquiry on its head. Instead of asking how we can make people comply, Yuval asks whether we can trust them to comply on their own. This reversal opens up fascinating connections between regulation, trust, and compliance that cut across every domain we care about: tax collection, environmental protection, workplace safety, public health. For years, Yuval has been developing this research agenda, showing how behavioral science can help us understand when intrinsic motivation works better than fear of punishment. The instinct of most legal systems has been to assume the worst and design accordingly, but his work demonstrates that voluntary compliance can actually outperform heavy-handed enforcement in many contexts. It reduces costs, builds genuine cooperation, and creates lasting cultural change rather than resentful box-checking. The book maps out when these trust-based approaches succeed and when they fall short, giving regulators and policymakers a sophisticated framework for making smart choices.
Some of the book builds on work Yuval and I have done together over the years on organizational enforcement and whistleblowing. Those projects explored how internal governance structures can cultivate compliance from within rather than relying solely on external oversight. Now this new work takes that insight to the next level by examining how technology might enhance voluntary compliance rather than simply adding another layer of surveillance. Can algorithmic monitoring and AI oversight support trust-based regulation, or do they inevitably undermine the autonomy and dignity that fuel intrinsic motivation? Which is very much in line with more own work on the intersection between technology and law. Indeed our current joint research (with Ori Aronson) explores how predictive analytics might enable regulators to identify which individuals and entities can be safely trusted with lighter oversight, reserving intensive monitoring for genuine risks. This matters because in an era of declining faith in institutions and growing polarization, understanding how to cultivate genuine cooperation from citizens is essential to addressing every major challenge we face. Yuval’s book lays the conceptual groundwork for this next generation of regulatory design, one that moves beyond the false choice between blind trust and constant suspicion and suggest numerous innovative insights for any scholar with interest in the ability of law to change behaviour in an effective and just way.
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