ONLINE

Lloyd Cutler Lecture

Law, Order, and Inequality in Global Political Economy

How should we understand the role of law in global political and economic life? A century of intellectual and professional innovation facilitated a dramatic extension of legal arguments, norms, and institutional arrangements across the world. But that doesn’t mean we have a good picture of law’s role in the world – particularly in things we abhor, such as war, poverty, inequality, and climate change. To grasp law’s current global role more clearly, David Kennedy proposes we begin by focusing on the idea of struggle rather than order, on the distribution of stakes rather than the settlement of disputes. Doing so, he argues, should enable us to confront – and alter – the foundations of our political economic order.