Law Capitalism

Recent high-profile corporate scandals—such as those involving Enron in the United States, Yukos in Russia, and Livedoor in Japan—demonstrate challenges to legal regulation of business practices in capitalist economies. Setting forth a new analytic framework for understanding these problems, Law and Capitalism examines such contemporary corporate governance crises in six countries, to shed light on the interaction of legal systems and economic change. This provocative book debunks the simplistic view of law’s instrumental function for financial market development and economic growth. Using comparative case studies that address the United States, China, Germany, Japan, Korea, and Russia, Curtis J. Milhaupt and Katharina Pistor argue that a disparate blend of legal and nonlegal mechanisms have supported economic growth around the world. Their groundbreaking findings show that law and markets evolve together in a “rolling relationship,” and legal systems, including those of the most successful economies, therefore differ significantly in their organizational characteristics. Innovative and insightful, Law and Capitalism will change the way lawyers, economists, policy makers, and business leaders think about legal regulation in an increasingly global market for capital and corporate governance.

Tigar (Washington College of Law, American U.) has written a new introduction and extended afterword that update this Marxist analysis of law and jurisprudence, originally published in 1977. The study traces the role of law and lawyers in the rise of the European bourgeoisie. The new material discusses human rights issues and social movements over the past two decades, including political prisoners and the death penalty. c. Book News Inc.

The book provides a critical analysis of the legal mechanisms that help shape the capitalist system, and also makes proposals for deploying these tools in a different manner.Although often disguised in difficult legal jargon, in reality the main legal building blocks of the prevailing capitalist socio-economic system are simple, the most important being: (1) money; (2) the company form and (3) (neo)liberal state organization aimed at making markets as free as possible for the entrepreneurial sector. Having been used to create the socio-economic order over 2-3 centuries, the legal systems that helped shape capitalist societies around the globe have also contributed to a variety of fundamental problems that remain unaddressed by the capitalist system itself, such as ever-mounting public and private debt, pollution and climate change, an increasing polarization between rich and poor and a globally unjust fiscal order. By proposing alternative uses for the tools of law that shape capitalism, the book also makes proposals for dealing with these matters.

Using the theoretical tools drawn from historical materialism and deconstruction, Tzouvala offers a comprehensive history of the standard of civilisation.

Against a backdrop of seven hundred years of bourgeois struggle, eminent lawyer and educator, Michael E. Tigar, develops a Marxist theory of law and jurisprudence based upon the Western experience. This well-researched and documented study traces the role of law and lawyers in the European bourgeoisies's conquest of power and in the process complements the analyses of such major figures as R.H. tawney and Max Weber. Using a wide frange of primary sources, Tigar demonstrates that the legal theory of insurgent bourgeoisie predated the Protestant Reformation and was a major ideological ingredient of the bourgeois revolution.

"Capital is the defining feature of modern economies, yet most people have no idea where it actually comes from. What is it, exactly, that transforms mere wealth into an asset that automatically creates more wealth? The Code of Capital explains how capital is created behind closed doors in the offices of private attorneys, and why this little-known fact is one of the biggest reasons for the widening wealth gap between the holders of capital and everybody else. In this revealing book, Katharina Pistor argues that the law selectively "codes" certain assets, endowing them with the capacity to protect and produce private wealth. With the right legal coding, any object, claim, or idea can be turned into capital - and lawyers are the keepers of the code. Pistor describes how they pick and choose among different legal systems and legal devices for the ones that best serve their clients' needs, and how techniques that were first perfected centuries ago to code landholdings as capital are being used today to code stocks, bonds, ideas, and even expectations--assets that exist only in law. A powerful new way of thinking about one of the most pernicious problems of our time, The Code of Capital explores the different ways that debt, complex financial products, and other assets are coded to give financial advantage to their holders. This provocative book paints a troubling portrait of the pervasive global nature of the code, the people who shape it, and the governments that enforce it."--Provided by publisher.

A challenging and provocative book that contests the liberal assumption that the rule of law will go hand in hand with a transition to market-based economies and even democracy in East Asia. Using case studies from Hong Kong, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Japan and Vietnam, the authors argue that the rule of law is in fact more likely to provide political elites with the means closely to control civil society. It is essential, therefore, to locate conceptions of judicial independence and the rule of law more generally within the ideological vocabulary of the state.

One of his most important American studies of labor economics published in the twentieth century, this book outlines an evolutionary and behavioral theory of value based on data drawn from court decisions. Analyzing the meaning of reasonable value as defined by the courts, he finds that the answer is based on a notion of reasonable conduct. Expanding this point to encompass the habits and customs of social life, he shows that court decisions are based on customs that are powerful forces shaping the economic system. In an early review Wesley Mitchell declared that Commons [1862-1945] carried this "analysis further along his chosen line than any of his predecessors. Into our knowledge of capitalism he has incorporated a great body of new materials which no one else has used adequately.": American Economic Review, XIV (1924) 253.