Katharina Pistor, "The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality" (Princeton UP, 2019)
"Most lawyers, most actors, most soldiers and sailors, most athletes, most doctors, and most diplomats feel a certain solidarity in the face of outsiders, and, in spite of other differences, they share fragments of a common ethic in their working life, and a kind of moral complicity."\n\u2013 Stuart Hampshire, Justice is Conflict.\nThere are many more examples of professional solidarity, however fragmented and tentative, sharing the link of a common ethic that helps make systems, and the analysis of them, possible in the larger political economy. Writing from a law professor\u2019s vantage point, Katharina Pistor, in her new book, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (Princeton University Press, 2019) explains how even though law is a social good it has been harnessed as a private commodity over time that creates private wealth, and plays a significant role in the increasing disparity of financial outcomes.\nAs she points out in this interview, and her chapter \u2018Masters of the Code\u2019, it is \u2018critical to have lawyers in the room\u2019, and they clearly have the lead role in her well-researched and nuanced thesis centered on the decentralized institution of private law. Professor Pistor builds on Rudden\u2019s \u2018feudal calculus\u2019 providing the long view of legal systems in maintaining and creating wealth and draws on historical analogies including the enclosure movements as she interweaves her analysis of capital asset creation with a broader critique of professional and institutional agency. Polanyi and Piketty figure into Pistor\u2019s analysis among many others, as does the help of the state\u2019s coercive backing as she draws on the breadth of her own governance research and analysis of the collapsed socialist regimes in the 1990s, and a research pivot toward western market economies following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis.\nProfessor Pistor is a comparative scholar with a keen interdisciplinary eye for the relationship between law, values, and markets, dovetailing larger concepts with detailed descriptions of the coding of \u2018stocks, bonds, ideas, and even expectations\u2014assets that exist only in law.\u2019 All of which informs her inquiry into why some legal systems have been more accommodating to capital\u2019s coding cravings and others less so, as she describes the process by which capital is created. She moves beyond legal realism\u2019s less granular critiques, and as reviewers such as Samuel Moyn have suggested \u2013 this book \u2018deserves to be the essential text of any movement today that concerns itself with law and political economy\u2019.\nKatharina Pistor is the Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law, and the Director of the Center on Global Legal Transformation at Columbia Law School.\nKeith Krueger lectures at the SHU-UTS Business School in Shanghai.\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law