Economic Law: Anatomy and Crisis

Abstract

This article revisits the improbable concept of “economic law,” which originated in early- and mid-twentieth-century debates in search of a magical triad: a legal-political framework for a capitalist economy under democratic control. In analyzing its composite elements both in retrospect and in the current pandemic context, it becomes obvious how the elements generate complicated, potentially destructive dynamics with one another. The recently resurgent interest in the relationship between law and political economy provides a valuable opportunity to reimagine economic law at a time when many frameworks of the twentieth-century nation and post-welfare state have been exposed as vulnerable and fleeting—making the need for a critical legal methodology the more urgent. The analysis seeks to provide some starting points for such a methodology by taking a closer look inside the toolboxes that lawyers tend to open in times of crisis.

Keywords

• economic law
• power
• public-private divide
• corporate governance
• labor rights
• economic constitution
• neoliberalism
• transnational law
• methodology