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Copyright

Marija Bartl;

Published On

2025-06-05

Page Range

pp. 297–310

Language

  • English

Print Length

14 pages

15. Private Law and Political Economy

Chapter of: Uncovering European Private Law: A Student Handbook(pp. 297–310)
This chapter discusses the ‘political economic’ approach to private law. The
political economic approach is instrumental for the study of private law’s role
in making, and eventually remaking, different social institutions and processes,
such as markets, global value chains, corporations, globalisation etc. In this
chapter then, after situating the intellectual locus of ‘private law and political
economy’, I first outline how law and political economy scholars view the social
institution of markets, which is often the locus of their scholarly interest (Legal
Context 1). Second, to exemplify the kind of inquiry that one may encounter in
this line of scholarship, I ask what role private law plays in fostering either more
emancipatory (‘freedom’) or more coercive (‘exploitation’) side of markets
as social institutions. To do so, I start by discussing how private law enables
the more coercive side of markets, by way of narrowing down what unfair
exploitation and unjust enrichment stand for (Legal Context 2).1 I then turn
to outline how private law may foster more emancipatory side of markets, by
means of expanding what ‘private’ stands for (Societal Implications).

Contributors

Marija Bartl

(author)
Professor of Transnational Private Law at University of Amsterdam
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4380-9961
https://www.uva.nl/profiel/b/a/m.bartl/m.bartl.html

Prof. Dr. Marija Bartl is Professor of Transnational Private Law at the Amsterdam Law School and the Director of the Amsterdam Centre for Transformative Private Law (ACT). She is a (co)president of European Law Unbound-Society and the editor of European Law Open. She has taught several courses, including ‘European Contract Law’, ‘Private Law in European and International Perspective’, ‘Law as a Change-Maker’, and ‘Making Markets Beyond the State’. Bartl has held appointments as a Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute, a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Nantes, Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Law School, Boston University and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Law in Hamburg. She has recently published an open access monograph Reimagining prosperity: Toward a New Imaginary of Law and Political Economy in the EU (CUP, 2024). Currently, Bartl is working on her ERC-funded project ‘Law as a Vehicle for Social Change: Mainstreaming Non-Extractive Economic Practices (N-EXTLAW)’, exploring how private law may help mainstream ‘non-extractive economic practices’. See https://www.uva.nl/profiel/b/a/m.bartl/m.bartl.html