Presentation

The law and lawyers have played a key part in creating the concepts and institutional forms of corporate capitalism in the past century and a half. Legalization has been playing an equally central role especially in the recent decades in forming the institutions of the new global governance. This paper is based on the final chapter of my forthcoming book, Regulating Global Corporate Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, April 2011), and it evaluates some of the main theories and debates about this role of law, and put forward my own perspective, in the light of the accounts and analyses expounded at greater length in the book.

The general argument is that what has been constructed is a corporatist economy, in which highly socialized systems of economic activity are managed in forms which allow private control and appropriation, yet are very different from those of the `market economy’ envisaged by classical liberal philosophy and political economy. Although the state and the economy appear as separate spheres, they are intricately interrelated in many ways, especially in the definition and allocation of property rights, and in extensive state support and interventions determining investment and profit rates. Working at the interface of the public and private in mediating social action and conflict, lawyers have played a key role in constructing corporatist capitalism, and are central to its governance and legitimation. This is also due to lawyers’ techniques and practices of formulating and interpreting concepts and norms which are inherently malleable and indeterminate, which provide the flexibility to manage the complex interactions of private and public. These techniques and the lawyers who deploy them have also been central both to the construction of the classical liberal system of interdependent states, and its gradual fragmentation and the transition to networked regulation and global governance.

Biographic Note

Sol Picciotto is an emeritus professor of Lancaster University (having retired in 2007), and is the current Scientific Director of the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law. He graduated in law from Oxford University, and took a JD at the University of Chicago Law School.

His first teaching post was at the then University College, Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), in 1964-68, following the political independence of that country and during the liberation struggles in southern Africa. He then taught at Warwick University (1968-1992) before moving to Lancaster. His research and publications have covered Marxist theories of state, law, and international capital; international law; and international economic and business law and regulation, including especially international taxation, financial market regulation, the WTO, and intellectual property rights. His book, Regulating Global Corporate Capitalism will be published in April 2011 by Cambridge University Press.