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The Code of Capital: Book Talk Webinar with Katharina Pistor
The Code of Capital: Book Talk Webinar with Katharina Pistor
Start time:
June 20, 2019 @ 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
EDT
Location:
Online
Type:
Other
Speakers
Katharina Pistor
Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia Law School; Directo
Description
Join us for a webinar with Professor Katharina Pistor of Columbia Law School to discuss her new book, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality.
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.
Katharina Pistor is the Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law and director of the Center on Global Legal Transformation at Columbia Law School. She is the coauthor of Law and Capitalism: What Corporate Crises Reveal about Legal Systems and Economic Development around the World and the coeditor of Governing Access to Essential Resources. She lives in New York City.
Hosted by Working Group(s):
Organizers
Attendees
Roxana Vatanparast
Abhijit Tagade
Son Nguyen
Zamira Xhaferri
Paul Nelson
Ayoze Alfageme
Ahmed Mori
naouar ELKHADIRI
Fabian Schmidt
Kangle Zhang
Christina Mosalagae
Michael Yodzis
Filipe Silva
Anthony Crawford
Katharina Pistor
Luisa Scarcella
Vladimir Bogoeski
J.Christopher Proctor
Aleksandar Stojanović
Karina Patricio Ferreira Lima
Diego Gonzalez Cadenas
Wolfgang Theil
Pedro Magalhães Batista
Nurlan Jahangirli
Rimma Chichakyan
Nikhil Kumar
Marco Giraudo
Siobhan Airey
Carolyn Sissoko
Constantin Hartmann
NISHARA NAIDOO