The Code of Capital, Katharina Pistor
The Code of Capital, Katharina Pistor
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The Code of Capital
How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality

Author: Katharina Pistor

Narrator: Laural Merlington

Unabridged: 11 hr 23 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/08/2019


Synopsis

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.

About Katharina Pistor

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, with Curtis J. Milhaupt, 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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Wick on July 08, 2021

The law is used to protect capital. This is a dense and challenging read that I found enlightening about all the ways law is coded to protect the assets of the rich. The rich and powerful have armies of corporate lawyers whose job it is to take laws that are vague and malleable and bend them into shi......more

Goodreads review by Li on March 18, 2020

The best non-fiction I've read since college. Feels like everything I've learned in law school leads up to this book.......more

Goodreads review by Richard on March 05, 2022

This book was a huge disappointment. There was nothing here that hasn't been covered better in other books that I have read. Of course the law is a tool that the rich use to protect their wealth. Of course the system is hugely tilted in their favor. And of course the enablers who service this system......more