Katharina Pistor

A compelling explanation of how the law shapes the distribution of wealth 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.

How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality

The Code of Capital

Que el capital reproduce la riqueza y que eso lo ha puesto en el centro de las economías modernas lo sabemos bien. Lo que no sabemos —o no sabíamos hasta la aparición de El código del capital— es exactamente qué es el capital y cómo es que activos tan aparentemente inocuos como una parcela de tierra o una línea de código digital pueden convertirse en riqueza. En El código del capital Katharina Pistor —una de las estudiosas más novedosas del derecho— lo explica con claridad, mostrando cómo las leyes se han entrelazado para que los abogados puedan codificar ciertos activos para la producción y reproducción de la riqueza, invistiéndolos de los atributos clave para ello y usando distintos módulos legales. Pistor desvela en este volumen escrito con extraordinaria claridad y fluidez la naturaleza acumulativa del derecho, la complicidad del Estado con las estrategias privadas de codificación de riqueza, la multiplicidad de actores involucrados en el proceso —y la notoria ausencia de una mente maestra controlándolo todo—. El código del capital fue nombrado uno de los mejores libros de 2019 por el Financial Times y Business Insider.

Cómo el derecho crea riqueza y desigualdad

El código del capital

Curtis J. Milhaupt

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.

What Corporate Crises Reveal about Legal Systems and Economic Development around the World

Law & Capitalism

George A. Bermann

This book's principal aim is to critically address the institutional and substantive legal issues resulting from European enlargement, chiefly those relating to the legal foundations on which the enlarged Union is being built. The accession of new Member States creates the potential for a stronger and more powerful Europe. Realising this potential, however, will depend on the ability of the EU to develop functional and effective governance structures, both at the European level and at the level of the individual Member States. While the acquis communautaire will ensure that formal laws in the new Member States will be aligned with those of existing members, the question remains as to how effective institutions will be in implementing changes, and what effects the imposed changes will have on the legitimacy of the new legal framework. This book, containing the work of leading scholars in law and social sciences, examines the current and future legal framework for EU governance, and the role that new members will - or will not - play in the creation of that framework, paying particular attention to the specific challenges membership in the EU poses to the acceding states of Central and Eastern Europe. It is a book which will contribute to and influence debates over constitutionalism and legal harmonisation in the EU.

Law and Governance in an Enlarged European Union

Jeffery Sachs

This collection of essays examines how Russia's distinctive traditions of law-and lawlessness-are shaping the current struggle for economic reform in the country.

The Rule Of Law And Economic Reform In Russia

Olivier De Schutter

Essential resources do more than satisfy people's needs. They ensure a dignified existence. Since the competition for essential resources, particularly fresh water and arable land, is increasing and standard legal institutions, such as property rights and national border controls, are strangling access to resources for some while delivering prosperity to others, many are searching for ways to ensure their fair distribution. This book argues that the division of essential resources ought to be governed by a combination of Voice and Reflexivity. Voice is the ability of social groups to choose the rules by which they are governed. Reflexivity is the opportunity to question one's own preferences in light of competing claims and to accommodate them in a collective learning process. Having investigated the allocation of essential resources in places as varied as Cambodia, China, India, Kenya, Laos, Morocco, Nepal, the arid American West, and peri-urban areas in West Africa, the contributors to this volume largely concur with the viability of this policy and normative framework. Drawing on their expertise in law, environmental studies, anthropology, history, political science, and economics, they weigh the potential of Voice and Reflexivity against such alternatives as pricing mechanisms, property rights, common resource management, political might, or brute force.

Katharina Pistor

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