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Speaker: (University of Glasgow)

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About the lecture

The analysis of prices is an activity that has traditionally taken place within the domain of Economics, and legal scholars have had very little to say about how prices are formed. Yet as the impacts of price spikes for resources like oil or gas, the effects of long-standing inequalities relating to the terms of international trade, the contentious practice of pricing of sovereign debt, or the current cost-of-living crisis all underline, prices have significant implications for a matter with which lawyers have traditionally been concerned: justice.

Legal institutions are increasingly understood by economic sociologists and institutionalist economists to be of critical importance in processes of price formation, yet there has been no systematic attempt to understand the role of law in the formation of prices. In this lecture, I build on important foundations around ‘the just price’ to evaluate the potential of developing an alternative theoretical approach to analysing prices from a legal perspective. I identify and critically discuss four different ways of analysing the role of law in processes of price formation that take as their point of departure the following intellectual traditions: I) New Institutional Economics, II) Economic Sociology, III) Law and Political Economy, and IV) Marxist Economics. In addition to offering a comparative analysis of distinct legal-theoretical perspectives on the engineering of prices, I reflect on whether it is possible to advance a legal theory of prices that is both sociologically convincing and that also has explanatory power.

Prices govern peoples’ lives and dictate courses of action to elected governments, often entrenching and exacerbating inequalities. Can a greater understanding of their legal engineering open up any avenues to making prices any more ‘just’?

About the speaker

Anna Chadwick joined the Univesity of Glasgow as Lord Kelvin Adam Smith Research Fellow in 2017, after completing a two-year Max Weber Fellowship at the European University Institute, in Florence. She was awarded her doctorate by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in November 2015. She holds a Masters Degree in Public International Law and International and UK Human Rights Law (LLM) from King’s College London, and an LLB from the University of Leeds. Prior to her doctoral studies, Anna spent one year working for the legal charity, Reprieve, where she undertook investigation and research on death penalty cases. Anna’s monograph, Law and the Political Economy of Hunger, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019.

About Current Legal Problems

The Current Legal Problems (CLP) lecture series and annual volume was established over fifty five years ago at the Faculty of Laws, ¹û¶³Ó°Ôº and is recognised as a major reference point for legal scholarship.

Book your place

You can attend this event in-person at ¹û¶³Ó°Ôº Faculty of Laws (Bentham House,Ìý4-8 Endsleigh Gardens,ÌýLondonÌýWC1H 0EG) or alternatively you can join via a live stream.

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