LPE: Law, Markets, & Justice

Legal education generally relies upon two unsustainable demarcations: first, it separates law from politics and economics and, secondly, it treats legal fields (contracts, constitutional law, property etc) separately from each other. Generally speaking, private law is equated with ‘economics’ and public law with ‘politics’. These demarcations are neither intellectually rigorous nor practically useful. For that reason, the proposed course aims to bridge these gaps. It will offer our students an opportunity to bring together different strands of their studies, including public and private as well as domestic and international law. In so doing, the course will invite students to think about how law creates the concepts and institutions that sustain economic production and circulation in Australia and globally. Additionally, it will give students the tools to understand the changing ideas about the relationship between law and political economy that have underpinned common law legal systems for the past 150 years.