Product Description
Recent high-profile corporate scandals—such as those involving Enron in the United States, Yukos in Russia, and Livedoor in Japan—demonstrate challenges to legal regulation of business practices in capitalist economies. Setting forth a new analytic framework for understanding these problems, Law and Capitalism examines such contemporary corporate governance crises in six countries, to shed light on the interaction of legal systems and economic change. This prov… More >>
#1 by Reader on April 16, 2010 - 4:09 am
NO ONE should be taken in by the grandiose title of this book. “Law and Capitalism” raises expectations that two of our fundamental social institutions will be probed and dissected. Instead, the book is built around six short case studies of recent corporate crises (e.g., Enron) in six different countries. The cases are sandwiched between introductory and concluding chapters that wax social scientific and try to distill lessons for the field of law and development.
The cases are interesting, but it isn’t always clear how they contribute to the central argument; one gets the feeling they were selected because they were well-reported. In fact, the whole exercise feels like it was stolen from a class on comparative corporate law. It probably was.
The authors’ basic message is sensible, namely, that too many World Bank officials and development scholars, in their eagerness to find a legal “technology” to underpin economic growth, overlook messy realities about markets and the law. However, their own book is thin and ephemeral. Not recommended.
Rating: 2 / 5