Call #7 - The Political Economy and Private Law
The YSI Finance, Law, and Economics Working Group is pleased to announce a Call for Abstracts for a workshop at the YSI Asia Convening, 06-09 May 2019 at University of Da Nang, Vietnam. We especially encourage interdisciplinary approaches which can help foster closer interaction between different disciplines, as that is one of the aims of our Working Group. The central theme of our workshop will be the political economy of private law, but we will welcome interventions addressing the issues in finance, law and economics that our working group has been focusing in previous events.
Calls for harmonization have challenged the diversity of private law throughout the history of capitalism, whether in relation to property, contract trust or any other of its parts. This process, both in the global and local context, has been closely linked to the vision of equal parties interacting in the marketplace on equal grounds and is thus often coupled with calls for increasing liberalisation on the premise of autonomy.
At the same time, diverse traditional as well as innovative usages of private law have also sometimes served as pockets of resistance to the adverse effects that harmonization sometimes brings. Examples include the use of trust mechanisms to take land out of private markets or to facilitate the conversion of companies to employee ownership. Others include reconceptualising property through the tradition lens of the commons, or the creation of open access licensing for research.
Furthermore, both calls for harmonization and liberalisation and the use of legal innovation as resistance are often dogged by a misunderstanding of the basic legal concepts involved. For example, when it comes to the concept of property, the dominant approach tends to ignore the fact that bank money is a debt and fundamentally different from money in notes and coins which in turn changes the meaning of numerous concepts related to money such as “theft”, “loosing” or “transfer” and the way that monetary policy is designed.
The primary goal of the workshop is to approach the vast field of political economy of private law by trying to understand the economy as a system interconnected with law and government. In contrast to policies and theories that assume self-regulating markets we propose a more cautious approach that adopts a more adequate consideration of the institutes of private law. In this way we aim to shed light on how different actors with competing interests interact through institutions of private law to advance socially integrative or extractive ends.
We will welcome proposals that approach these questions from sociological, anthropological, historical, economic, or any other related perspectives. As the purpose of the workshop is to strengthen the network of young scholars that work in the field of finance law and economics, please apply if your research pursues a heterodox project in the field even if it does not strictly fit into the above delineated topic.
About the Finance, Law, and Economics Working Group
Finance, Law, and Economics are inherently interrelated disciplines. The Finance, Law and Economics Working Group brings economists, lawyers and practioners together to integrate Macroeconomics, Finance and legal studies in order to understand issues of financial stability, financial market reform and the future of the banking and payments systems.
HOW TO APPLY
To submit your abstract to this call, go to https://ysd.ineteconomics.org/rc. In your abstract, please clearly identify your research question, elaborate on methodology, and list your preliminary findings and/or tentative conclusions.
Apply here: https://ysd.ineteconomics.org/rc
Note: you must be logged into the YSI website to apply.
Deadline: 17 March 2019
Contact: [email protected]