Katharina Pistor (Columbia Law School)

28 November 2024, 12pm-4:30pm, UClouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles

Cycle Interdisciplinarités en droit

Language: English

Katharina Pistor is a professor at Columbia law school and a leading scholar and writer on corporate governance, money and finance, property rights, and comparative law and legal institutions.

She will speak about her most recent book, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality.  In this book, she examines how assets such as land, private debt, business organizations, or knowledge are transformed into capital through contract law, property rights, collateral law, and trust, corporate, and bankruptcy law. The Code of Capitalwas named one of the best books of 2019 by the Financial Times and Business Insider. 

12:00 pm-12:45 pm: Lunch

12:45 pm-1:30 pm: Interview with Katharina Pistor, moderated by Anne-Lise Sibony

During the interview, you will learn how Katharina Pistor developped her unique blend of interdisciplinary legal scholarship and what advice she has for doctoral students in this regard. 

1:45 pm-2:45 pm: The Code of Capital as an interdisciplinary endavour (presentation + Q&A)

One of the strengths of his book is its interdisciplinary nature, its ability to articulate different disciplines, both legal (contract law, PIL, securities law, but also public law and public international law) and non-legal (history, economics, political theory, sociology of law), in a way that sheds light on the role of law and supports its analysis. Katharina Pistor will explain how she went about creating this interdisciplinary architecture. 

2:45 pm-3 pm: Cofee break

3 pm-4:30 pm: Scholarship and activism

The Code of capital develops a very sharp critique of the role of the law and lawyers in the development of capitalism and inequalities. In this second part of the seminar, Katharina Pistor will adress how she sees the relationships between scholarship and political activism. 

Participants are invited to prepare a short (5 min) opening statement to explain how their research grows from their values or leads them to sharpen their political views and how they integrate this dimension in their writing.

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Location

To access Room P61, enter via the main entrance: Bd du Jardin Botanique 43 1000 Brussels.

Take the lift to the 4th floor.

As you exit the lift, on your right, cross the terrace, enter the Club House (cafeteria) and exit through the second door on the right (next to the water dispenser).