Is capitalism driven by markets alone, or by the legal codes that quietly determine who owns what, who controls assets, and who benefits from growth? What if inequality is not an accident of the system, but the product of deliberate legal design? And how should education prepare students to understand the architecture of economic power?

Katharina Pistor is the Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia Law School and a leading scholar on the legal foundations of global finance. She is the author of The Code of Capital, a groundbreaking book that argues that capital is created through law. Her work examines how legal institutions, private contracts, and regulatory frameworks structure global markets and shape the distribution of wealth.

In this episode, we explore Katharina’s central claim that capital does not exist independently of legal systems. She explains how assets are transformed into capital through specific legal modules such as property rights, collateralization, and enforceable contracts. We discuss how elite legal expertise has historically been used to code certain assets for protection and amplification, often contributing to rising inequality.

Our conversation also turns to the educational implications of this insight. If economic outcomes are shaped by legal design, then understanding capitalism requires more than studying supply and demand. It requires examining institutions, power, and the normative assumptions embedded in law. This episode invites listeners to reconsider what capitalism is, who benefits from its current structure, and how greater transparency and civic literacy could reshape the system from within.