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Abstract

This article reveals the tension between evolutionary, functionalist driven notions of law and more historical and contingent accounts of the emergence of particular legal systems, practices, and forms. It builds on this by examining how forms of economic organization and economic outcomes are determined by law, and, in particular, by national legal systems. The article problematizes this argument by showing how law in the contemporary period that impacts on economic organization is moving and dynamic, national and international, public and private, soft and hard. This requires a focus on three phenomena: first, the internal structure of legal systems and the sorts of powers and capacities that particular actors accrue in those contexts; second, the development of law as a business and what this means for the dynamism of law from different national contexts; and third, how this dynamism has led to new forms of innovation and internationalization in law.