Capitalist Law

• Department of Economics
• Department of History
• Department of Law
• Max Weber Programme for Postdoctoral Studies
• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
• Department of Political and Social Sciences
• Florence School of Transnational Governance
• Central Coordination Unit
• Finance and society

Organised by Law as Science and co-sponsored by the Finance and Society cluster at the EUI.

Hybrid event - The speaker will present her latest book via Zoom

Capitalism is a system and like other complex systems, it follows different laws of expansion, reproduction, and contraction than single assets. Dissecting the legal modules of capital assets, therefore, is only the first step in deciphering the nature of capitalist law, which is the purpose of my new book project. It requires lifting the gaze from the micro-institutional level where capital is coded as one asset and one transaction at a time, to the operation of capitalism and the forces that define and drive it.

These forces can be summarized as (1) privileging private over public ordering, (2) empowering private actors, (3) enabling them to employ the state’s coercive powers, and (4) under-writing legal arbitrage in the name of capital even when this violates the purpose for which law was enacted.