Law and institutions : legal construction of the market and the company

This third lecture explores legal representations of economic forms. This highlights the sense in which legal concepts are not simple descriptions of economic relationships, but normative constructs that help to constitute these relationships. While law partly reflects an external social and economic "reality", it also contributes to the constitution of this other reality, and must therefore be seen to evolve with it. It follows that legal concepts such as "employee" or "company" occupy a discursive space that is as political as it is technical. A legal conception of economic forms is one that sees the market as linked to institutional rules and social norms, in contrast to the prevailing view in economic theory, which presents the market as a market in the process of adapting, and the state as pre-existing.