The Law-Money Nexus

2013 — 2014

Overview

Description

This series examines the legal architecture underpinning monetary and financial systems in order to better understand the dynamic relationship between law, money and the economy.

Rationale

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes declared in A Treatise on Money that

“[T]he age of chartalist or State money was reached when the State claimed the right to declare what thing should answer as money to the current money of account—when it claimed the right not only to enforce the dictionary but also to write the dictionary. To-day all civilised money is, beyond possibility of dispute, chartalist.”

Recent economic turbulence and ongoing crises across the world have revealed significant flaws in the structural design of the global financial system, underscoring the urgent need for renewed attention on the law-money nexus. However, despite the wide proliferation of legal scholarship on monetary issues ranging from financial regulation, budget policy, taxation, and payments systems, as well as various attempts to integrate economic concepts to legal analysis, there is a notable dearth of attention on the law of money itself.

Year: 2013 to 2014

Symposia

Money as a Hierarchical System

Central Banking in Theory and Practice

Credit as Contract

Taking Money for Granted

Lincoln’s Greenbacks