'Capacitas': Contract Law and the Institutional Preconditions of a Market Economy
Simon Deakin
Working Papers from Centre for Business Research, University of Cambridge
Abstract:
Capacity may be defined as a status conferred by law for the purpose of empowering persons to participate in the operations of a market economy. This paper argues that because of the confining influence of the classical private law of the nineteenth century, we currently lack a convincing theory of the role of law in enhancing and protecting the substantive contractual capacity of market agents, a notion which resembles the economic concept of 'capability' as developed by Amartya Sen. Re-examining the legal notion of capacity from the perspective of Sen's 'capability approach' is part of a process of understanding the preconditions for a sustainable market order under modern conditions.
Keywords: contract law; capacity; capability approach (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K12 K31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-hpe, nep-law and nep-reg
Note: PRO-2
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/cbrwp325.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cbr:cbrwps:wp325
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Papers from Centre for Business Research, University of Cambridge
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ruth Newman ().