Call for Papers: Law, Political Economy and the Legal Geography of Money

June 25th & 26th, Sciences Po Paris (France)

Submission deadline: April 12th at midnight (Paris time) via call@fedmoney.eu

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 conference seeks to foreground the constitutive role of space in critical legal and institutional engagements with the spatiality of capitalism.

We welcome, in particular, submissions related to the following themes, while remaining open to other topics:

• the role of central banks in the legal geography of money;
• the role of the legal system more broadly in the geography of finance;
• the role of digital currencies and central bank digital currencies in the legal geography of money;
• the role of central bank currency swap arrangements in the global monetary order;
• the role of global legal norms in the global financial flows;

The keynote will be delivered by prof. Robert C. Hockett (Cornell Law School).

Interested applicants should submit an abstract no longer than 400 words to call@fedmoney.eu by April 12th at midnight (Paris time).