The Sustainability Agenda

Katharina Pistor, Professor of Comparative Law and director of the Center on Global Legal Transformation at Columbia Law School, discusses her most recent book The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality. In this fascinating discussion, she highlights the various ways that debt, complex financial products, and other assets are selectively coded to protect and reproduce private wealth—and the malleability of the legal system, that can be redesigned, and repurposed--by well paid lawyers. Katharina discusses the recent trend to create environmental financial assets-and highlights what she sees as a crucial, perennial, question: who will bear any financial losses (associated with climate change investments). Katharina also shares some ideas on we might create a financial system that would be more socially, environmentally and financially equitable. Katharina Pistor is the Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law and director of the Center on Global Legal Transformation at Columbia Law Schoo