Law, Political Economy and the Legal Geography of Money

In recent years, scholars have shown renewed interest in the geography of money and finance. While economic geography has long examined how space shapes capitalism and its core/periphery dynamics, more recent work has turned to the spatial nature of money and finance. Globalization, for example, has famously been propelled by the rise of global financial centers, which has reconfigured the relationship between these centers and the sovereign states they inhabit, and has created new peripheries in the process. Likewise, spatial inequalities help explain how macroeconomic boom and bust cycle occurs. 

From the era of the Gold Standard to neoliberal globalization, monetary regimes have consistently structured the flow of money between different spaces, and accordingly co-constructed the significance of money as well as space.

Despite this surge in interest for the geography of money and finance, the role of law in the geography of money and finance remains relatively underexplored. While critical legal scholars, from American Legal Realism to the Law and Political Economy movement, have long been interested in understanding law as constitutive of capitalism, the spatial dynamics of money and finance remain a significant blind spot of contemporary critical legal thought. The workshop seeks to foreground the constitutive role of space in critical legal and institutional engagements with the spatiality of capitalism.

FEDMONEY is an ERC Starting Grant funded by the European Union (ERC, FEDMONEY, project no 1010754110). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.