The first FRIED seminar of semester 2 will take place on Thursday January 24th in the 1st Floor Practice Suite of the Chrystal Macmillan Building. I am delighted to announce that our speaker will be Dr Anna Chadwick of the University of Glasgow. Anna Chadwick is a Lord Kelvin Adam Smith Research Fellow in the School of Law whose research focuses on the relationships between law and processes of financialisation in the global economy, the significance of contract law in the development of new financial instruments, and the role of public international law and international economic law in contributing to the production of food insecurity.
Please circulate these details among your networks and I hope that many of you will be able to attend what promises to be a fascinating talk. Registration is not required for this seminar.
Speaker: Dr Anna Chadwick, University of Glasgow
Date and time: Thursday 24th of January, 16.00 -17.30
Venue: Ist Floor Practice Suite, Chrystal Macmillan Building, George Square, EH8 9LD.
Title: Law, Finance, and the Political Economy of Hunger
Abstract:
In recent years, considerable emphasis has been placed on developing legal solutions to poverty and deprivation. Most notably, human rights law seeks to empower the vulnerable and to improve their position in global society by mandating governments and courts to 'respect, protect, and fulfil' socio-economic rights. In the first part of this presentation, I will challenge the widespread positioning of law as a solution to the problem of hunger. I will draw on the work of Amartya Sen, Karl Marx, and Karl Polanyi, along with Institutionalist scholarship on markets, to demonstrate that legal regimes actively contribute to the production of hunger in the world. In the second half of the talk, I will discuss a more recent development that is aggravating food insecurity worldwide: the phenomenon of commodity derivatives speculation. I will argue that the current fixation on developing new regulatory rules to contain the 'excesses' of finance may not be the best strategy. Instead, I will argue, greater attention needs to be paid to how developments in contract law have enabled the development of a market in financial instruments linked to food prices in the first instance.