How markets work: The lawyer’s version☆
W. Mark C. Weidemaier and Mitu Gulati are on the faculties of the University of North Carolina Law School and Duke University Law School, respectively. An earlier version of this article was presented at the conference on Socializing Economic Relationships: New Perspectives and Methods for Transnational Risk Regulation, at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford. We thank Bettina Lange, Dania Thomas, and conference participants for comments on the article.
W. Mark C. Weidemaier and Mitu Gulati are on the faculties of the University of North Carolina Law School and Duke University Law School, respectively. An earlier version of this article was presented at the conference on Socializing Economic Relationships: New Perspectives and Methods for Transnational Risk Regulation, at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford. We thank Bettina Lange, Dania Thomas, and conference participants for comments on the article.
From Economy to Society? Perspectives on Transnational Risk Regulation
ISBN: 978-1-78190-738-2, eISBN: 978-1-78190-739-9
Publication date: 28 December 2013
Abstract
This article combines two sources of data to shed light on the nature of transactional legal work. The first consists of stories about contracts that circulate among elite transactional lawyers. The stories portray lawyers as ineffective market actors who are uninterested in designing superior contracts, who follow rather than lead industry standards, and who depend on governments and other outside actors to spur innovation and correct mistakes. We juxtapose these stories against a dataset of sovereign bond contracts produced by these same lawyers. While the stories suggest that lawyers do not compete or design innovative contracts, their contracts suggest the contrary. The contracts, in fact, are consistent with a market narrative in which lawyers engage in substantial innovation despite constraints inherent in sovereign debt legal work. Why would lawyers favor stories that paint them in a negative light and deny them a potent role as market actors? We conclude with some conjectures as to why this might be so.
Keywords
Citation
Weidemaier, W.M.C. and Gulati, M. (2013), "How markets work: The lawyer’s version W. Mark C. Weidemaier and Mitu Gulati are on the faculties of the University of North Carolina Law School and Duke University Law School, respectively. An earlier version of this article was presented at the conference on Socializing Economic Relationships: New Perspectives and Methods for Transnational Risk Regulation, at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford. We thank Bettina Lange, Dania Thomas, and conference participants for comments on the article.
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2013 Emerald Group Publishing Limited