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Full-Text Articles in Law
Personal Responsibility For Systemic Inequality, Martha T. Mccluskey
Personal Responsibility For Systemic Inequality, Martha T. Mccluskey
Contributions to Books
Published as Chapter 15 in Research Handbook on Political Economy and Law, Ugo Mattei & John D. Haskell, eds.
Equality has faded as a guiding ideal for legal theory and policy. An updated message of personal responsibility has helped rationalize economic policies fostering increased inequality and insecurity. In this revised message, economic “losers” should take personal responsibility not only for the harmful effects of their individual economic decisions, but also for the harmful effects of systemic failures beyond their individual control or action. In response to the 2008 financial crisis, this re-tooled message of personal responsibility promoted mass austerity in …
The Culture Of Financial Institutions: The Institution Of Political Economy, David A. Westbrook
The Culture Of Financial Institutions: The Institution Of Political Economy, David A. Westbrook
Contributions to Books
Published as Chapter 1 in Integrity, Risk and Accountability in Capital Markets: Regulating Culture, Justin O'Brien & George Gilligan, eds.
The 19th century legal historian Henry Maine famously defined progress, and by extension, liberal modernity, as the substitution of relations based on status (especially family and title), to relations based on contract, especially trade and employment. The article suggests that Maine's assertion, however comforting as a political matter, simply does not hold with regard to the credit relations central to contemporary society. Credit transactions, even retail transactions, are based on trust and interlocking webs of obligation across agents (until recently …