Ideas, Law & Market Order

This four-part series is about a simple but often overlooked fact: markets do not run themselves, but rest on ideas and laws that people have fought over. It begins with the political philosophies that have tried to reconcile free markets with community and tradition, then digs into competing theories of law and the state. It ends with two very concrete questions: how judges actually decide cases, and how competition law shapes the power of the largest firms.

• Civil Society & the Market in Modern Conservative Thought: Can free markets survive without strong families, churches and communities to hold society together? This workshop explores how conservative thinkers from Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville to Wilhelm Röpke, Robert Nisbet and Michael Novak, alongside the Catholic Church's social teaching, tried to embed the market in a wider moral order. It ends in Chile, where these ideas helped shape the 1980 constitution drafted under Pinochet.

  • Guests: to be announced

• Law & the State: Three Genealogies of Conflict: What is law really, and whose interests does it serve? This workshop brings three very different answers into conversation: Michel Foucault's history of law as a technique of power, Evgeny Pashukanis's Marxist theory of law as a product of market exchange, and Costantino Mortati's idea that every constitution rests on a "material" foundation of real political forces. Together they offer a powerful toolkit for seeing past the formal rules to the conflicts underneath.

  • Guests: Marco Goldoni (University of Glasgow), Pasquale Pasquino (CNRS and New York University) and Paolo Napoli (EHESS)

• The Birth & Proliferation of American Legal Realism: "We are all realists now," American lawyers like to say, but legal realism has lost much of its critical edge along the way. This workshop traces how the idea that judges make law rather than simply find it grew from a challenge to legal orthodoxy into the dominant strand of American legal thought, inspiring both the radical critique of Critical Legal Studies and the market logic of law and economics. By studying how judicial decisions are actually made, rather than how they are justified, it sheds light on why American courts face a growing crisis of trust, and why realism remains controversial in continental Europe.

  • Guests: Brian Tamanaha (Washington University in St. Louis), Karl Klare (Northeastern University) and Mark Tushnet (Harvard Law School)

• The Political Economy of Competition: Competition policy is one of the pillars of modern capitalism, yet it is rarely discussed beyond the circles of lawyers and economists. This workshop follows its history from the birth of American antitrust to the European market order, comparing how the US and the EU have approached the power of dominant firms and what that reveals about their different models of capitalism. It closes the series at a timely moment, as transatlantic tensions rise and a handful of tech giants concentrate unprecedented economic power.

  • Guests: Chase Foster (King's College London), Frédéric Marty (CNRS and Université Côte d'Azur) and Angela Wigger (Radboud University)