Transnational Law and Economic Sociology

Transnational law interacts in various ways with the law of the global economy. Students and experts of transnational law will therefore most likely come across economic arguments. Economic sociology questions mainstream economic perspectives, including their adaptations to the law, and also differs from new institutional economics. By integrating different levels of analysis, economic sociology, and related scholarship in critical political economy, seeks to provide a more comprehensive account of the interrelations of law, economy, and society—and of the rationalities at play. This chapter outlines an economic sociology of law which exposes the constructed nature of the law of the global economy and elucidates the elective affinity between law and economics, which also affects our understanding of transnational legal ordering. To reconstruct this tendency, the chapter develops the concept of the law of market society, which has a critical potential with regard to more conventional perspectives on transnational economic law.