Law's Regulatory Relevance?: Property, Power and Market Economies

Focusing on the information economy, free trade exploitation, and confronting terrorist violence, Mark Findlay critiques law's regulatory commodification.

Conventional legal regulatory modes such as theft and intellectual property are being challenged by waves of property access and use that demand the rethinking of property 'rights' and relationships with law.

Law's Regulatory Relevance theorises how the law should reposition itself in order to help rather than hinder new pathways of market power, confronting the dominant neo-liberal economic model that values property through scarcity.

With in-depth analysis of empirical case studies, the author seeks to expose the return of law to its communal utility in strengthening social ties, which will in turn restore property as social relations rather than fititious market commodities. In a world of contested narratives about property valuing law needs to ground its inherent regulatory relevance inherent value in the ordering of social change.

This book is an essential read for students of law and regulation wanting to explore the challenges to neo-liberal market economies, especially concerning issues of communitarion governance and social resistance. Policy makers interested in law's failing capacity, particularly through criminalising attacks on conventional property rights will find in this book a new way of enisaging the reasons that law's regulatory relevance is at a cross-roads.