The Market as a Legal Concept

Desautels-Stein argues that contemporary legal scholarship and judicial doctrine rely on an impoverished conception of the market that obscures its social and institutional foundations. The author contends that law typically treats markets as natural, self-regulating mechanisms rather than as human constructs requiring ongoing legal scaffolding. Through historical and conceptual analysis, the article demonstrates how markets depend fundamentally on legal rules, enforcement mechanisms, and social conventions that distribute power and allocate risks. Desautels-Stein examines contract law, property law, and corporate law as domains where market functioning depends on specific legal choices. The article challenges the economic efficiency paradigm that dominates market regulation and advocates for a more critical legal analysis that acknowledges how market structures embed distributional choices and reflect particular visions of economic organization.

Keywords: market concept · legal foundations of markets · contract law · property rights · economic efficiency · institutional design