I just finished Katharina Pistor’s book The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality.
I enjoyed it, although it’s not without shortcomings. I particularly like her telling of how the law has evolved to ensconce the power of owners (my words, not hers). Most interesting (to me) is the evolutionary nature of this process. Old ideas (like the trust) get re-used, altered, and nested to create the complex legal web of ownership use by today’s ruling class. And of course, there’s the role of lawyers as the Consigliori of capitalists …
In effect, Pistor is describing what Nitzan and Bichler call the nomos of capitalism … the belief structure in which it operates and perpetuates. Nitzan and Bichler deal with this structure at a very high level. Pistor gets into the nitty gritty, which I enjoyed.
What annoyed me? Well, there are aspects of the book that are decidedly mainstream. And predictably, there’s no engagement with CasP (although one Nitzan-Bichler paper gets a mention in a footnote). But I would love to see CasP researchers dive more into the law, because it is undoubtedly what codifies capital, as Pistor observes.