Pistor’s Code of Capital: Wealth Inequality and Legalism About Capital

In The Code of Capital, Katharina Pistor seeks to trace out the ultimate sources of wealth and capital. Her central claim—that wealth and capital are ultimately created by law—is at once more commonsensical and intuitive, on the one hand, and more insightful and provocative, on the other hand, than it might initially seem. At a time when there is deep and widespread interest in and concern about wealth inequality, Pistor argues (successfully, I think) that much inequality can be traced back to oft-ignored legal fixtures. She also argues (unsuccessfully, I think) that we can trace inequality back to law precisely because law is itself partly constitutive of wealth and capital. Fortunately, her more fruitful claims about how law affects the distribution of wealth and capital can be divorced from the less fruitful metaphysical claims about the nature of law and capital and lay the foundation for much future work of interest.