Video Episodes  

The Laws of Capitalism - Katharina Pistor. 

The Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) Education Program has launched a new lecture series on "The Laws of Capitalism" with Katharina Pistor [see the original INET video site or YouTube playlist] 

Prof. Katharina Pistor is a legal scholar at Columbia University.  She is the Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law and director of the Center on Global Legal Transformation at Columbia Law School.   Her work spans comparative law and corporate governance, law and finance, and law and development. She is the co-recipient of the Max Planck Research Award (2012), a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science and a Fellow at the European Corporate Governance Institute. Her most recent book is "The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality" (Princeton UP, 2019).

In this seven-part lecture series, this renowned scholar guides us through the process of the legal construction of capitalism.  Capital requires two elements - an asset and a legal code.  The legal code is necessary to transform an asset into capital, and give it the capacity to generate wealth for its owner.  The institutions of capitalism - property, finance, corporations - all depend on the protections provided by legal coding.  These institutions are not necessarily natural in the economy, but have been created by the law.  They have emerged from the evolution of the law, expanding the range and reach of what it decides to code.  Prof. Pistor breaks down the history, process, institutions and participants involved in the legal coding of capital.

Prof. Pistor reminds us that the legal system is a social resource, created for social benefit.  But she shows us how it has been harnessed and used by private actors to create and accumulate immense private wealth.  These gains have not been shared, but rather become an instrument of inequality - not only economic inequality, but inequality in law.  Private actors can opt out of jurisdictions, restrict the policies of domestic governments and erode democracy.  The laws of capitalism have allowed the private interests of a few to be elevated above the public interest.  Prof. Pistor suggests we can rewrite the legal code to make it fairer and allow democratic governments to regain the policy space needed to address the concerns of society.

We have put together a set of online supplementary resources for those who wish to dig deeper into the references Prof. Pistor makes in the lectures.  The links below, organized by video episode, go to resources currently available on the HET Website and elsewhere online.

These were collected with the assistance of Kurt Semm. 

 

  

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