Economic Wealth Creation and the Social Division of Labour by Robert P. Gilles

Author:Robert P. Gilles
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319763972
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

3. Legal Systems

As soon as humans developed writing, we started to write down social conventions and social behavioural rules as laws. Many of our social conventions can also be understood as “common” law, which refers to a system of unwritten rules that are recognised commonly in a society. These conventions quickly gave way in ancient times to law codes, mainly concerning civil and criminal law.

During the Roman era, very significant law codes were developed and adopted. One of the major law codes was the Justinian Code—or Codex Justinianus—, which was developed under the Byzantine emperor Justinian (issued 529–534 CE). This codex also incorporated religious law, regulating Christian religious practices in the Byzantine empire.

The Justinian Code forms the basis for all law systems in Europe that were developed later. In 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte issued the very influential Napoleonic Code, which is a main precursor to modern systems of law. Its Commercial Code (adopted 1807) regulated important aspects of civil law pertaining to property rights and contracting, which are essential for the development of nineteenth-century capitalist societies in Europe.

The successful implementation of these systems of commercial law was also based on the recognition of nation-states as regulators of capitalist socio-economic interaction. After the collapse of the feudal system, the nation-state acquired a monopoly on violence and the enforcement of laws over the subsequent centuries. This was formally recognised in the Treaty of Münster (1648) and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This in turn was based on the recognition of and trust in the nation-state as the main platform for the development of the capitalist socio-economic space in Europe and North America. The emergence of the nation-state as a platform for capitalist socio-economic development is an expression of the entrepreneurial function in the main western socio-economic spaces at that time.

One of the main tools that nation-states introduced as a binding force for trust-building is that of a constitution. These constitutions bring together the basic rights and obligations of members of these nation-states and the constitutional rules that govern the nation-states. As such, constitutions provided a set of common rights in the emerging capitalist socio-economic space in the nineteenth century.

Modern law systems are not just founded on civil and criminal law codes, but also on international treaties between nation-states. These were based on the emergence of international organisations of nation-states in the early twentieth century as the main platforms for the further development and integration of the capitalist socio-economic space. The evolution of the European Union (EU) from several limited international treaties and less integrated economic communities is the prime example of this development.

Through neo-liberal policies of nation-states and the EU since the 1980s, the importance of nation-states and international organisations has diminished in the twenty-first century in favour of transnational corporations (TNCs) as the main development platforms in our global economy as socio-economic spaces. Indeed, TNCs impose their own set of rules on its suppliers and customers that are binding and go beyond any jurisdiction. As a principal example of this phenomenon, I

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