| Title | 15. Private Law and Political Economy |
|---|---|
| Contributor | Marija Bartl(author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0448.15 |
| Landing page | https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0448/chapters/10.11647/obp.0448.15 |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Marija Bartl; |
| Publisher | Open Book Publishers |
| Published on | 2025-06-05 |
| Long abstract | This chapter discusses the ‘political economic’ approach to private law. The political economic approach is instrumental for the study of private law’s role in making, and eventually remaking, different social institutions and processes, such as markets, global value chains, corporations, globalisation etc. In this chapter then, after situating the intellectual locus of ‘private law and political economy’, I first outline how law and political economy scholars view the social institution of markets, which is often the locus of their scholarly interest (Legal Context 1). Second, to exemplify the kind of inquiry that one may encounter in this line of scholarship, I ask what role private law plays in fostering either more emancipatory (‘freedom’) or more coercive (‘exploitation’) side of markets as social institutions. To do so, I start by discussing how private law enables the more coercive side of markets, by way of narrowing down what unfair exploitation and unjust enrichment stand for (Legal Context 2).1 I then turn to outline how private law may foster more emancipatory side of markets, by means of expanding what ‘private’ stands for (Societal Implications). |
| Page range | pp. 297–310 |
| Print length | 14 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
Prof. Dr. Marija Bartl is Professor of Transnational Private Law at the Amsterdam
Law School and the Director of the Amsterdam Centre for Transformative Private Law
(ACT). She is a (co)president of European Law Unbound-Society and the editor of
European Law Open. She has taught several courses, including ‘European Contract Law’,
‘Private Law in European and International Perspective’, ‘Law as a Change-Maker’, and
‘Making Markets Beyond the State’. Bartl has held appointments as a Fernand Braudel
Fellow at the European University Institute, a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies
in Nantes, Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Law School, Boston University and the Max
Planck Institute for Comparative Law in Hamburg. She has recently published an open
access monograph Reimagining prosperity: Toward a New Imaginary of Law and Political
Economy in the EU (CUP, 2024). Currently, Bartl is working on her ERC-funded project
‘Law as a Vehicle for Social Change: Mainstreaming Non-Extractive Economic Practices
(N-EXTLAW)’, exploring how private law may help mainstream ‘non-extractive
economic practices’. See https://www.uva.nl/profiel/b/a/m.bartl/m.bartl.html