Uploaded March 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
06 March 2025, 1:00 pm–2:00 pm
This lecture was delivered by Dr Anna Chadwick, as part of the Current Legal Problems Lecture Series 2024-25
Speaker: Dr Anna Chadwick (University of Glasgow)
Chair: Dr Agnieszka Smoleńska (LSE)
About the lecture
The analysis of prices is an activity that has traditionally taken place within the domain of Economics, and legal scholars have had very little to say about how prices are formed. Yet as the impacts of price spikes for resources like oil or gas, the effects of long-standing inequalities relating to the terms of international trade, the contentious practice of pricing of sovereign debt, or the current cost-of-living crisis all underline, prices have significant implications for a matter with which lawyers have traditionally been concerned: justice.
Legal institutions are increasingly understood by economic sociologists and institutionalist economists to be of critical importance in processes of price formation, yet there has been no systematic attempt to understand the role of law in the formation of prices. In this lecture, I build on important foundations around ‘the just price’ to evaluate the potential of developing an alternative theoretical approach to analysing prices from a legal perspective. I identify and critically discuss four different ways of analysing the role of law in processes of price formation that take as their point of departure the following intellectual traditions: I) New Institutional Economics, II) Economic Sociology, III) Law and Political Economy, and IV) Marxist Economics. In addition to offering a comparative analysis of distinct legal-theoretical perspectives on the engineering of prices, I reflect on whether it is possible to advance a legal theory of prices that is both sociologically convincing and that also has explanatory power.
Prices govern peoples’ lives and dictate courses of action to elected governments, often entrenching and exacerbating inequalities. Can a greater understanding of their legal engineering open up any avenues to making prices any more ‘just’?
06 March 2025, 1:00 pm–2:00 pm
This lecture was delivered by Dr Anna Chadwick, as part of the Current Legal Problems Lecture Series 2024-25
Speaker: Dr Anna Chadwick (University of Glasgow)
Chair: Dr Agnieszka Smoleńska (LSE)
About the lecture
The analysis of prices is an activity that has traditionally taken place within the domain of Economics, and legal scholars have had very little to say about how prices are formed. Yet as the impacts of price spikes for resources like oil or gas, the effects of long-standing inequalities relating to the terms of international trade, the contentious practice of pricing of sovereign debt, or the current cost-of-living crisis all underline, prices have significant implications for a matter with which lawyers have traditionally been concerned: justice.
Legal institutions are increasingly understood by economic sociologists and institutionalist economists to be of critical importance in processes of price formation, yet there has been no systematic attempt to understand the role of law in the formation of prices. In this lecture, I build on important foundations around ‘the just price’ to evaluate the potential of developing an alternative theoretical approach to analysing prices from a legal perspective. I identify and critically discuss four different ways of analysing the role of law in processes of price formation that take as their point of departure the following intellectual traditions: I) New Institutional Economics, II) Economic Sociology, III) Law and Political Economy, and IV) Marxist Economics. In addition to offering a comparative analysis of distinct legal-theoretical perspectives on the engineering of prices, I reflect on whether it is possible to advance a legal theory of prices that is both sociologically convincing and that also has explanatory power.
Prices govern peoples’ lives and dictate courses of action to elected governments, often entrenching and exacerbating inequalities. Can a greater understanding of their legal engineering open up any avenues to making prices any more ‘just’?
