Abstract

Over the last four decades, we have witnessed an extraordinary historical experiment in the making of global markets. This was, in part, a legal experiment, in the sense that it entailed the construction of new legal and regulatory market infrastructures, and the mobilisation of new legal technologies. These decades provide us, then, with an incredibly rich and illuminating historical record for investigating the general question of how markets – and economic orders more generally – are legally constituted, and the more specific question of the role of international law in those processes. 

In this lecture, Professor Lang asks us to take another look at that period, with a view to understanding better the international legal constitution of global markets. In doing so, he offers an alternative view of the present period, in which international law is both in a state of rupture, and at the same time constitutive of that rupture's conditions of possibility.