Title of the course: A Sociology of Law and Economics

Type of course: compact course

Course schedule: 23-27 March 2015, 20 lessons (10x2), times and venues to be specified

Teacher: Sabine Frerichs, Assistant Professor at the University of Helsinki

Course content: The course is divided into five themes, which encompass 4 lessons (2x2) each. Literature for each theme will be specified later.

1. Law of Market Society

Taking off from Polanyian ideas, law is conceived as a social institution ‘embedding’ the economy, but also as a ‘fictitious commodity’ which is itself subject to market forces. The law of market society includes all types of law that constitute or regulate the market, be it public or private law, national, international or even transnational law. The tension between its commodifying and decommodifying functions drives ‘law’s great transformation’ from its universalist origins in the Western (=Roman) legal tradition to its national closings in the era of the nation-state, and its transnational openings under conditions of Europeanisation and globalisation.

2. Moral Economy of Debt

The global financial crisis and the ensuing Eurozone crisis raised important questions as to who owes what to whom in today’s transnational society of debt. The concept of the ‘moral economy of debt’ allows exploring both the positive side and the normative side of debt relations. While the moral-economy approach has developed in the social sciences, its critical ambitions and normative underpinnings also link it with questions of moral, political and legal philosophy. In its application to the transformation and commodification of debt relations in modern capitalism, it sheds light on the redistribution of risks and responsibilities between creditors and debtors.

3. From Rights to Incentives

The turn ‘from government to governance’, which describes recent transformations of the modern state, entails a move from political and social rights to economic incentives. In the last decade, the new governance semantics made its way from economics and politics to the law, where it has taken the shape of a ‘new legal realism’. However, the political-economic changes that it seeks to capture remain under-explored in the legal strand of the debate, which turns empirical arguments into normative arguments. The unacknowledged slippage between economic and political modes of analysis ultimately serves to legitimise the reformatting of modern welfare capitalism.

4. Governance by Nudges

Behavioural economics - a version of economics that is enriched with psychological insights into our stupidities - has recently developed into a successful ‘pop science’. However, from a sociological point of view, it is necessary to compare and confront the ‘old’ homo oeconomicus rationalis and the ‘new’ homo oeconomicus behavioralis with a third model - homo oeconomicus culturalis - which demonstrates the limits of the previous models. While governance by nudges might look, at first sight, as a tempting idea, there is good reason to question the normative side of the project and to emphasize its potential effects on our legal culture and our human condition.

5. Neuroutilitarianism

Another lead discipline in terms of its popularisation is cognitive neuroscience, representatives of which recently garnered much public attention when they exposed the free will as an illusion. Sociologists could respond that the free will is better understood as a social institution, which as such has to be taken for real, no matter how deterministic our brain processes may look like. But neuroscience has not only generated spin-offs in (neuro)philosophy but also in (neuro)economics and even in (neuro)law. The common denominator of much of these new disciplines seems to be some form of neuroutilitarianism, which calls for a sociological critique.