Sublime

Realizing the centrality and power of law for coding capital has important implications for understanding the political economy of capitalism.

Many legal scholars have already drawn attention to the fact that the operation of the market hinges on legal institutions that facilitate price discovery.

For centuries, private attorneys have molded and adapted these legal modules to a changing roster of assets and have thereby enhanced their clients’ wealth. And states have supported the coding of capital by offering their coercive law powers to enforce the legal rights that have been bestowed on capital.

Everywhere we probed a little deeper, we found the core institutions of private law: contract, property, collateral, trust, corporate, and bankruptcy law.

Two legal systems dominate the world of global capital: English common law and the laws of New York State.

at the frontiers where new capital rights are minted day by day in the offices of law firms, states take a back seat. But states provide the legal tools that lawyers use; and they offer their law enforcement apparatus to enforce the capital that lawyers have crafted.

financial capital, the intangible capital that exists only in law.

The law is a powerful tool for social ordering and, if used wisely, has the potential to serve a broad range of social objectives; yet, for reasons and with implications that I attempt to explain, the law has been placed firmly in the service of capital.

Recognizing that capital is made, and not simply the product of superior skills, shifts attention to the processes by which different assets are slated for legal coding and to the states that endorse relevant legal modules and offer their coercive powers to enforce them.