Reforming the Law of Capitalism with Katharina Pistor

What if decades of debate about capitalism have been conducted at the wrong level? Most critiques of markets focus on outcomes, inequality, environmental damage, stagnant wages, and most reform proposals reach for public law to fix them. Katharina Pistor's argument, developed in The Code of Capital and now extended in The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It, is that both the diagnosis and the cure have been misaimed. The outcomes are downstream of private law: the contracts, property rights, and corporate structures that code wealth upward while remaining largely invisible to democratic politics.Host Matteo Gatti brings his own thesis into direct dialogue with Pistor's. His book Corporate Power and the Politics of Change documents what happens when political gridlock pushes corporations into the governing role. Pistor's book goes one level deeper — asking why the legal system is built to concentrate private power in the first place, and why public law interventions keep failing to change that. The conversation moves from structural diagnosis through a series of concrete reform proposals, none of which require an act of Congress.Katharina Pistor is the Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia Law School, a Fellow and Research Member of ECGI, and the author of the bestselling The Code of Capital (Princeton University Press) and The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It (Yale University Press).Matteo Gatti is Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School, where he writes on corporate power, governance, and political economy. He is a Research Member of ECGI and the host of this podcast.Links:The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It by Katharina Pistor, Yale University Press (2025)The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality by Katharina Pistor Princeton University Press (2019)Corporate Power and the Politics of Change by Matteo Gatti, Cambridge University Press (2025)Reconstituting the Code of Capital: could a progressive European code of private law help us reduce inequality and regain democratic control? by Martijn W. Hesselink, European Law Open (2022)Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 EU Directive 2004/25/EC on Takeover Bids EU Product Liability Directive, Council Directive 85/374/EECOther Episodes:The Limits of Private Sector-led Reform with Mark Roe - EP. 6 in Corporate Power and the Politics of Change with Matteo Gatti