Panelist and Columbia Law Professor Katharina Pistor, who has written two books and numerous articles on this subject, said, “While this system has produced a lot of private and national wealth, it has done in ways that contradict basic principles of justice by allowing some to use a social resource such as the legal system to build wealth and private power and use it to dominate others without being held accountable to them.”
The Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law and a faculty co-director of the Columbia Center for Political Economy, Pistor wrote “The Law of Capitalism and How To Transform It,” published last fall by Yale University Press.
On the panel, Pistor will be joined by Aaron Benanav, assistant professor at Cornell University’s Department of Global Development. The title of the event comes from Benanav’s two-part essay – Beyond Capitalism – that was published last summer over two issues of the New Left Review, in which he asserted the need for change:
“If there is ever to be a left break beyond the current political impasse — the liberal-capitalist establishment locked in a wrestler’s embrace with the ultra-capitalist right — it will ultimately require the elaboration of an economic system beyond capitalism itself.”
Pistor and Benanav will each provide introductions to the key themes of their recent writing, with two additional academics serving as discussants:
- Suresh Naidu, Professor of International and Public Affairs and the Jack Wang and Echo Ren Professor of Economics; and
- Jeremy Kessler, the Stanley H. Fuld Professor of Law at Columbia Law.
