0 If a rule or law is unenforceable, it is impossible to force people to obey it.
1 an unenforceable law or system cannot be accepted as legal in a court of law:
2 that people cannot be made to obey, or that cannot be made to work effectively:
Unfortunately, where storage and pumping capacity are limited and non-riparian water rights unenforceable, banking is not practical.
The unenforceable law is hardly qualified to be an institution, but the practice of bribing corrupt law enforcers does qualify.
Although the government had a time-honored policy against squatting, it was clearly unenforceable.
A contract to steal a car should be unenforceable, because car theft should be discouraged.
It may be that in 1668-9 he did attempt more general restrictions on music that were extensively flouted and therefore became unenforceable.
High information, monitoring and transaction costs, lack of collateral following unenforceable property rights, and moral hazard problems all contribute to absent or malfunctioning credit markets in these economies.
A propertybased analysis of pregnancy would explain why surrogacy contracts are unenforceable, and why the couple who have commissioned the surrogacy cannot coerce the surrogate during pregnancy.
Since these arrangements could usually not bear scrutiny on many other grounds, rendering such contracts unenforceable in a court of law was equivalent to no punishment at all. 40.