December 21, 2021
Erie, M. (2021). Is There a Chinese “Code of Capital”? Law & Social Inquiry, 1-7. doi:10.1017/lsi.2021.78
First View
Book Review: Pistor Katharina. The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019
Excerpt
Professor Katharina Pistor has accomplished a rare feat in her book The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality. She has provided a compelling explanation for how private law encodes certain assets as capital and, in so doing, facilitates wealth accumulation as well as economic stratification; moreover, she does so using an effortless style that renders the complexity of private law readily comprehensible for a general audience. In the face of increasing gaps in many countries’ income levels and between countries in the North and the South, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, Pistor’s call to action is all the more urgent.
In this review, I want to express my appreciation for the scope of Professor Pistor’s persuasive argument by extending her analysis to a phenomenon that largely lies outside the purview of her discussion—that of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and its ascent from the margins to the center of global capitalism. This approach might be deemed unfair as Pistor’s universe of examples—from the House of Medici to the Lehman Brothers—derive from the history of Euro-American jurisdictions, for these were the traditional pivots of capitalism. The reason for this is that it has been mostly English and New York law that have provided the substantive and procedural law for capital’s “code.”
