One of the most enduring questions in regulatory theory is whether legal systems can rely on voluntary compliance over coercive enforcement. In his seminal work, Can the Public Be Trusted?, Yuval Feldman interrogates the conditions under which states can substitute trust-based strategies for coercive control, leveraging the normative force of civic cooperation. Drawing on an exceptionally rich body of empirical work, which spans environmental regulation, taxation and pandemic governance, the book offers a finely grained account of compliance as a contingent and internally differentiated phenomenon.
Notably, the book refuses to resolve its animating question. Even after hundreds of pages of analytical excavation, whether the public can be trusted remains indeterminate. This indeterminacy is not a failure of analysis but its most instructive insight. Feldman shows that voluntary compliance is structurally unstable: intrinsic motivation may be crowded out, co-operators may be undermined by free riders, and trust-based regimes may invite intensified monitoring precisely in the attempt to distinguish good faith from opportunism. The generativity of Can the Public Be Trusted? lies not in the answers it supplies, but in the conceptual terrain it reconfigures. The book neither affirms nor denies the feasibility of trust as a mode of governance. Instead, it insists that trust be understood as a regulatory aspiration embedded in a dense landscape of empirical and normative trade-offs: one far more complex, and far more consequential, than prevailing regulatory theory has acknowledged to date. In doing so, Feldman leaves the reader with both a sharpened appreciation of the promise of voluntary compliance and a sobering account of its limits, while demanding a more disciplined and self-reflective vocabulary for thinking about trust in law.
The book proceeds as follows. Chapter 1 introduces the regulatory challenge of eliciting public cooperation in the absence of pervasive monitoring and coercive enforcement. The analysis reframes the conventional trust inquiry by shifting its direction: rather than focusing on citizen trust of the Government, it asks when the Government may responsibly trust its citizens. In so doing, the chapter exposes the dilemma facing policy-makers who must decide under conditions of persistent uncertainty and limited capacity to predict cooperative behaviour ex ante. Chapter 2 deepens this inquiry by disaggregating the motivational foundations of compliance, challenging binary accounts. It develops a nuanced taxonomy of compliance motivations and shows how regulatory instruments interact, often counterproductively, with intrinsic drivers of obedience. Chapter 3 turns from concepts to mechanisms, examining how various regulatory tools, ranging from command and control to nudges, reshape the motivational landscapes over time. Rather than asking whether these tools “work”, the chapter interrogates how they alter the meaning and sustainability of compliance itself, with particular attention to processes of motivational crowding-out. Chapter 4 situates these dynamics within broader institutional contexts, interrogating moderating factors such as trust-related mechanisms, and demonstrating that they are neither universally transferable nor normatively neutral. The normative stakes of these findings come to the fore in Chapter 5, which offers a sustained critique of the moral and distributive risks associated with voluntary compliance regimes. The chapter exposes a central paradox: regulatory strategies that appear less coercive on the surface may, in practice, demand deeper forms of surveillance, moral manipulation or selective trust. Chapter 6 extends this analysis cross-culturally, examining whether trust, solidarity, and rule-of-law norms can themselves be shaped by regulatory design, or whether they operate as relatively fixed background conditions that constrain policy-makers’ choices. Chapter 7 confronts the growing role of technology in mediating trust, exploring whether data-driven differentiation between co-operators and non-co-operators can reconcile trust-based governance with risk management. The chapter critically evaluates the promise of technological calibration against its ethical costs, particularly the dangers of opacity, bias and the erosion of equal civic standing. The book then grounds its theoretical framework in three central domains of regulation. Chapter 8 analyzes public health governance, drawing lessons from the COVID pandemic regulation. Chapter 9 turns to taxation. Chapter 10 examines environmental regulation. The book concludes in Chapter 11 by articulating criteria for when reliance on voluntary compliance can be deemed desirable and justified. The book’s breadth and sophistication leave little space open for simple rebuttal. Feldman pre-empts most lines of challenge with impressive thoroughness. What follows, therefore, are not criticisms in the conventional sense but avenues for further reflection.
One such opening concerns the need for a thicker normative and democratic grounding. While Can the Public Be Trusted? is firmly anchored in an extraordinarily rich empirical and behavioural literature, its normative ambitions would benefit from a more explicit and sustained engagement with democratic and constitutional theory, for asking whether the public can be trusted implicitly presupposes a more fundamental inquiry: whether governing through trust is itself an appropriate aspiration of the state, and how such an aspiration fits within particular understandings of political authority and citizenship. Although the book briefly touches on these themes in its treatment of liberal constraints, manipulation and distributive risk, it largely approaches trust as a regulatory variable whose value lies in its capacity to improve compliance outcomes rather than as a constitutive feature of a democratic order. Such orientation leaves under-examined the deeper implications of adopting governmental trust in the public as a governing stance. One must bear in mind that trust is not merely an alternative to coercion, nor a softer regulatory technique. Rather, it reconfigures the allocation of responsibility between state and citizen, potentially shifting burdens of governance onto individuals while attenuating institutional accountability. A state that relies on voluntary compliance may (intentionally or not) recast regulatory failure as civic failure and transform collective obligations into individualised moral duties. Whether such a transformation is democratically attractive, constitutionally permissible or normatively troubling cannot be resolved by empirical calibration alone. Engaging more directly with democratic theory, particularly accounts of legitimacy, public responsibility and the proper scope of state authority, would deepen the book’s inquiry by clarifying not only when trust-based regulation is feasible or effective, but when it is normatively appropriate as an organising principle of state power.
A second point for reflection concerns the relational and recursive structure of trust. The book’s signature move of shifting the analytic focus from whether citizens trust the state to whether the state can trust its citizens is both original and productive. Yet, it presupposes a level of conceptual separability between these two orientations that rarely exists in regulatory life: in most domains of governance, governmental trust and public trust are not independent variables, but mutually reinforcing phenomena. The state’s confidence in citizens’ willingness to comply is formed within, and continually reshaped by, the same institutional interactions through which citizens come to assess the trustworthiness of public authority. Trust thus functions neither as an exogenous condition nor as a pre-political endowment, but as an outcome of an institutional ecology where authority is continuously recalibrated. Any inquiry into whether citizens can be trusted is inseparable from an inquiry into how the state has acted, and continues to act, as a regulator and lawgiver.
This recursive perspective also brings into focus a further dimension that remains largely implicit in the book’s analysis: the normative character of the obligations with which compliance is sought. The question of whether the public can be trusted to comply cannot be answered without attending to what, precisely, citizens are being asked to comply with. By treating compliance primarily as a behavioural propensity, the book’s analysis risks bracketing off and abstracting away from the content of law itself. Yet voluntary compliance is always directed towards particular legal norms, not towards “legality” in the abstract. Laws that are experienced as arbitrary, poorly reasoned, or unjustly burdensome predictably elicit different patterns of cooperation than those that are publicly justified and democratically grounded. From this perspective, trust is not merely a tool for improving regulatory performance but a diagnostic of the normative quality of governance. A state’s willingness to rely on voluntary compliance reflects its reading of past citizen behaviour, but that behaviour is itself a response to the state’s prior exercise of authority. Trust does not precede governance as a background assumption; it is produced, sustained or depleted through governing practices themselves. Nor can this relational account be severed from the substantive demands of law. A theory attuned to these dynamics may better situate trust within the ongoing work of governance.
A third line of reflection arises from the book’s episodic engagement with the private ordering tradition. Feldman invokes the “order without law” literature to enrich his account of cooperation and to discipline its ambitions. Drawing on the canonical works of Lisa Bernstein (“Opting Out of the Legal System: Extralegal Contractual Relations in the Diamond Industry” (1992) 21 Journal of Legal Studies 115), Robert Ellickson (Order without Law (Cambridge 1991)) and others, he shows that norm-based governance can, under certain conditions, substitute for formal legal enforcement. Yet these cases are treated as peripheral and outside the book’s core theoretical architecture, due to the heterogeneity underlying the state and its citizenry. In so doing, Feldman’s analysis downplays the most important insight of the spontaneous-order tradition – namely, its rejection of the individual as the primary unit of normative uptake. Thus, the central insight of private ordering is that norm internalisation is an irreducibly collective process. Compliance is not an atomistic decision triggered by state-led trust or coercion; it is the downstream effect of group-level meaning-making and social endorsement. Norms are filtered and transformed by intermediary institutions, such as community and religious leaders, labour unions, professional associations, corporate hierarchies and social influencers. What appears as voluntary individual compliance is, in fact, the culmination of prior social work performed by these and other collectives.
Consequently, Feldman’s focus on the state-individual dyad is analytically restrictive. Although corporations and communities appear in his analysis, they function as contextual variables rather than constitutive sites of governance. Yet, regulatory success in domains such as public health or environmental protection depends less on the state’s assessment of individual trustworthiness than on its ability to enlist group-based authorities. The critical question is not whether the individual is trustworthy, but which collective actor possesses the normative standing to define compliance. By framing trust as a bilateral exchange between state and citizen, Feldman captures only the terminal moment of the governance sequence. In practice, the state often trusts intermediaries, who then generate compliance through their own internal structures. A theory of trust that abstracts from these systems mistakes the surface manifestation of order for its generative source. Engaging private ordering at this depth would reorient the book’s project: shifting the inquiry from whether the state should trust individuals to how the state should position itself within pre-existing systems of collective norm production.
Ultimately, Can the Public Be Trusted? is a remarkable achievement. It succeeds in deconstructing the simplistic binary between coercion and cooperation while constructing the conceptual scaffolding for a new era of regulatory theory. The book’s brilliance lies in its refusal to offer comfortable answers, revealing trust as a structurally unstable regulatory aspiration. At the same time, it opens generative avenues for reflection. A more sustained engagement with democratic and constitutional theory could clarify the normative stakes of trust-based governance; a relational and recursive account would situate trust within the social and political institutions that produce it; and a deeper integration of collective and intermediary actors would illuminate the architecture through which voluntary compliance emerges. These are not shortcomings but invitations, underscoring the conceptual richness of Feldman’s inquiry and the expansive potential of his framework. Feldman’s analysis does more than illuminate the dynamics of trust. It transforms the question of whether the public can be trusted into a lens through which the mechanics of authority and democratic life can be reimagined for years to come.
