Conference: The Market as a Legal Construct

Markets arise and operate through law—not just through public regulation but also through private law regimes (in property, contract, and tort) that create entitlements, enforce market exchanges, and limit expropriation. Appreciating the significance of law as the infrastructure of markets reveals that market structures and many of the challenges that they pose—runaway inequality, the erosion of corporate accountability, and the commodification of politics—result from a complex set of choices and developments, including foundational choices that can remain disguised, far below the consequences that they produce. We will pursue questions such as, what models of the legal subject, the legal entitlement, inter-subjective legal relations, and legal authority are immanent in market orders, and what conception of law itself do these models invite? Papers from this conference are slated for publication in a special edition of Law and Contemporary Problems, with Daniel Markovits (Yale Law School) and Hanoch Dagan as guest editors.

​

The conference was held on September 20-21, 2019 at Yale Law School ​​

Co-sponsored by the Center for Private Law, Yale Law School

​