All large firms exploit regulatory variation across jurisdictions by exporting activity to strategic locations around the globe. Less well known are the ways major economic players bring other jurisdictions to them without moving at all. The use of governing law clauses by which parties select which jurisdiction’s laws will apply to their contracts, means that many commercial contracts today, especially in finance, have little or no significant connection to the jurisdictions that govern them. In this article, I explore 20th-century transformations in US choice of law practices to argue that changing conceptions of freedom of contract and the public–private distinction have been intimately linked to increasingly flexible economic geographies and a reterritorialization of economic governance. The results have been far from homogeneous; governing law clauses have become an important tool of competition among jurisdictions, with some losing control of economic activity within their own borders, while others, like New York and England, have gained influence far beyond theirs.
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Fred Block's book Capitalism: The Future of an Illusion and accompanying commentary in Environment and Planning A push back against the tendency to see "the economy" as fixed, static and separate from the rest of society. In a moment when Thatcher's mantra "There is No Alternative" has been thoroughly entrenched on the right and center for decades in many places, his work provides a much-needed tool for countering these hegemonic ideas. As Block points out, powerful stories about the economy as a natural and autonomous mechanism that will automatically bring wealth and greater equality if left alone have not only been impeding just social reforms but also contributing to the resurgence of right-wing nationalism and bigotry around the world. Block's challenge to these ideas, in an unusually accessible form, is an important intervention in the ongoing public debate about how we organize our social and economic lives.Block's critique of essentialist conceptions of "capitalism" takes aim at certain leftist analyses as well-most importantly, at those whose fixed definitions of capitalism lead them to conclude that mere reforms are futile, and that There is No Alternative but Socialist Revolution. Challenging both left and right, Block argues against all forms of economic reductionism, and instead emphasizes the inextricable imbrication of economic, political, legal and cultural processes. By emphasizing the huge variation in social forms among societies labeled as "capitalist," Block expands our options for thinking creatively about what kinds of societies are possible, even without getting rid of the institutions of private property or profit-oriented competition altogether. He pushes us to consider how arrangements within a market-based system could be more just, and what might be done to get there. He takes the social-democracies societies of Northern Europe as well as the Bretton Woods-era United States as examples of societies that have been relatively equitable, and suggests that we can learn from and go much further than these have done.Wherever one comes down on the question of what social form is ideal, Block mounts a trenchant critique of the way a revolution-or-nothing approach impedes action in the present, and he makes a persuasive call for coalition-building across the left and center that
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