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Focal Point Theory of Expressive Law 1651 the sanctions it threatens to impose, that law works by what it says in addition to what it does. 2 Even this literature, however, mostly accepts the dominant view of the problem that law solves-that of cooperation. Without criticizing that approach, in this Article I pursue a different path. To explain one means by which law works expressively, I focus on a different problem of strategic interaction: not cooperation but coordination. Specifically, I claim that law provides a focal point around which individuals can coordinate their behavior. When individuals have a common interest in coordinating, as frequently occurs, a legal rule may guide behavior merely by influencing expectations about how others will behave

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Economic theories of legal compliance emphasize legal sanctions, whereas psychological and sociological theories stress the perceived legitimacy of law. Without disputing the importance of either mechanism, we test a third way that law affects behavior, an expressive theory that claims law influences behavior by creating a focal point around which individuals coordinate. We investigated how various forms of third-party "cheap talk" influence the behavior of subjects in a Hawk/Dove or Chicken game. Despite the players' conflicting interests, we found that messages highlighting an equilibrium tend to produce that outcome. Most striking, this result emerged even when the message was selected by an overtly random, mechanical process. We obtained a similar result when the message was delivered by a third-party subject; the latter effect was significantly stronger than the former only when the subject speaker was selected by a merit-based process. These results suggest that, in certain circumstances, law generates compliance not only by sanctions and legitimacy, but also by facilitating coordination around a focal outcome.