Jamee Moudud’s new book, Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism: The End of Laissez Faire? draws on the Original Institutional Economics and American Legal Realist traditions to propose a theory of institutional political economy. Focusing on property, money and credit, constitutional law, and corporations, this book argues that laissez-faire has never existed and that “state intervention versus de-regulation” and “market failures versus free markets” are false dichotomies. Moudud’s book proposes the need to engage with legal-economic theory and history to understand what institutions are, what economic regulation means, how law is intrinsically connected to the economy, and how power relations are distributed within capitalism.
Join the author and commentators Anna Chadwick and John Haskell for a Zoom discussion of this recent book on July 30, 2025 at 10 am eastern.
Speakers
Jamee K. Moudud (PhD) is a Professor of Economics at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York. He is Co-Founder and Board Member of the Law and Political Economy Collective (LPE-C), on the Steering Committee of the Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and Law (APPEAL), and is also on the Editorial Board and a Co-Founder of the Journal of Law and Political Economy.
Anna Chadwick is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Glasgow School of Law. Anna’s monograph, Law and the Political Economy of Hunger, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019.
John Haskell is a Professor/Chair at University of Manchester Law School and a Faculty Member at Harvard Law School Institute for Global Law and Policy. At Manchester, he is Director of Manchester Law and Technology Initiative and Lead at Initiative for Global Law and Political Economy.
