CONFERENCE: THE LAW OF POLITICAL ECONOMY - TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE FUNCTIONS OF LAW (original) (raw)
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The Law of Political Economy: Transformation in the Function of Law. Edited by Poul F. Kjaer
Cambridge University Press, 2020
This book develops the law of political economy as a new field of scholarly enquiry. Bringing together an exceptional group of scholars, it provides a novel conceptual framework for studying the role of law and legal instruments in political economy contexts, with a focus on historical transformations and central challenges in both European and global contexts. Its chapters reconstruct how the law of political economy plays out in diverse but central fields, ranging from competition and consumer protection law to labour and environmental law, giving a comprehensive overview of the central challenges of the law of political economy. It also provides a sophisticated and multifaceted framework for further enquires while outlining the contours of new law of political economy.
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Law and Political Economy' surveys recent approaches to the study of phenomena at the intersection of law, politics and the economy. These take an interdisciplinary perspective, viewing markets as fields of social power that are not spontaneous but created and reproduced in the meeting of legal norms, political action and economic activity. Through regulating economic relationships, the politico-legal order constitutes and reconstitutes the power relations that make up society. This, in turn, is driven by the formation of class, sectoral and geopolitical interests, as well as ideological convictions, which harness political and legal authority. We present these inter-related processes through exploring contemporary debates on inequality, inter-personal market relations, the relation between the state and market, and the effects of economic integration and globalisation on democracy and political selfdetermination.
The Law of Political Economy: An Introduction
Poul F. Kjaer (ed.): The Law of Political Economy: Transformation in the Function of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2020
The law of political economy is a contentious ideological field characterised by antagonistic relations between scholarly positions which tend to be either affirmative or critical of capitalism. Going beyond this schism, two particular features appear as central to the law of political economy: the first one is the way it epistemologically seeks to handle the distinction between holism and differentiation, i.e., the extent to which it sees society as a singular whole which is larger than its parts, or, rather, as a mere collection of parts. Different types of legal and political economy scholarship have given different types of answers to this question. The second feature of the law of political economy is the way in which it conceives of the relation between hierarchical and spontaneous dimensions of society, i.e., between firms and the market, or between public institutions and public opinion. The two distinctions can, however, be overcome through a third-way, emphasising the strategic role of law in mediating between holism and differentiation and hierarchy and spontaneity. This is demonstrated through a historical re-construction of the evolution of corporatist, neo-corporatist, and governance-based institutional set-ups of political economy.
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Leiden Journal of International Law
An increasing number of international law scholars over the last few years have started to turn their attention to the study of political economy. To what extent can this trend be considered an indication of an underlying 'disciplinary turn'? How should one understand the phenomenon of disciplinary turns? The answer we propose to this question in this article proceeds from the assumption that not all disciplinary shifts follow the same logic. Unlike the linguistic or the historical turn, the turn to political economy in contemporary international law does not represent an exercise in inter-disciplinary exploration. The concept of political economy used in international law has very little to do with the actual discipline of political economy. It is much more diffuse and unfocused in theoretical terms. What gives it its essential sense of identity is not any form of distinct methodological orientation, but rather its basic usefulness as a potential marker of critical self-distancing vis-`a-vis the mainstream international law tradition and its ideological function as a mediating device for the expression of a deep-seated concern about the structural injustices of modern capitalism.
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The economic and social life are considered by most authors as necessary in order to properly understand the essential traits of law and consequently as having a particular weight among all material sources of law. The role of the economic and especially financial-banking environments in the process of formation and functioning of law is very complex and difficult to underline. However, it is our goal in this paper to try and extract the main controversies in this inter-correlation between law and economics.
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The papers included in this collection are part of concerted project to develop a political economy of law in the contemporary global system. Over the past two decades, scholars have noted the expanding role of law, legal institutions, and legal agents that have been part of the process of "globalization," and have employed a number of frameworks to make sense of this process of legalization. A central theme of our project is that none of these frameworks has provided an adequate political economic analysis of the creation, diffusion, and use of law, and we present an alternative approach to advance the understanding of the turn to law across the many dimensions and sectors of the global system. The papers advance the analysis behind this approach and explore the various ways in which law matters in a variety of areas, including global finance, corporate governance, copyright, diplomacy, and the provision of security. Their goal is to advance our understanding of how law i...
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