Towards a Legal Theory of Prices - Mapping the Conceptual Terrain

The analysis of prices is an activity that has traditionally taken place within the domain of Economics, and legal scholars have had very little to say about how prices are formed. Yet as the impacts of price spikes for resources like oil or gas, the effects of long-standing inequalities relating to the terms of international trade, the contentious practice of pricing of sovereign debt, or the current cost-of-living crisis all underline, prices have significant implications for a matter with which lawyers have traditionally been concerned: justice. Prices govern peoples’ lives and dictate courses of action to elected governments, often entrenching and exacerbating inequalities. Can a greater understanding of their legal engineering open up any avenues to making prices ‘just’? In this seminar, Dr Chadwick builds on important foundations around the ‘just price’ to evaluate the potential of developing a theoretical approach to analysing prices from a legal perspective.

Dr Anna Chadwick is Senior Lecturer at the University of Glasgow where she researches and teaches in the fields of Law and Political Economy, Law and International Development, and Human Rights Law. She completed her PhD at the LSE in 2015. She was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute from 2015-2017, and a Lord Kelvin Adam Smith Fellow at the University of Glasgow from 2017-2019. Anna's research to date has predominantly been focused on the law and political economy of food systems and on dynamics of financialisation in the global political economy. Her monograph, Law and the Political Economy of Hunger, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. Anna is Co-Director of the Law and Political Economy in Europe Network, and she co-leads the Food Sovereignty Network at the University of Glasgow.