Katharina Pistor
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Member, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (2015)
Member of the Academia Europaea (2021)
University of London (LL.M.)
Harvard Kennedy School (M.P.A.)
University of Munich Faculty of Law (Dr. jur., J.S.D.)
Katharina Pistor | |
|---|---|
| Born | 23 May 1963 |
| Known for | Legal coding of capital; the legal foundations of money and finance; law and political economy |
| Awards | Max Planck Research Award (2012) Member, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (2015) Member of the Academia Europaea (2021) |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of Freiburg (Law) University of London (LL.M.) Harvard Kennedy School (M.P.A.) University of Munich Faculty of Law (Dr. jur., J.S.D.) |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law; Kennedy School of Government; Columbia Law School |
Katharina Pistor (born 23 May 1963) is a legal scholar from Germany who is known for her work on legal transplants, the legal institutions that form financial systems, and the legal foundations of capitalism. She is the Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia Law School, where she teaches corporate law, law and development, and law and finance. She co-directs Columbia University’s Center for Political Economy.
Pistor was born in Freiburg, Germany. She studied law at the University of Freiburg and earned an LL.M. from the University of London. She completed her legal clerkship in Hamburg and received an M.P.A. from the Harvard Kennedy School. She earned her Dr. jur. (J.S.D.) summa cum laude from the University of Munich Faculty of Law in 1998.
Academic career
Pistor began her academic career with research and teaching appointments at the Harvard Institute for International Development and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg, and at the Kennedy School of Government (Harvard University) as an assistant professor from 2000 to 2001.[1][2]
She joined the faculty of Columbia Law School in 2001 as an associate professor and became a full professor in 2005. She held the Michael I. Sovern Professorship of Law from 2008 to 2018 before being appointed Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law in 2018.[3]
Research
Pistor’s early research focused on the legal and economic transformation of the former socialist countries. A critic of the radical economic reform experiments launched in the region, she devoted her research to understanding the relationship between legal and economic change; the effect of legal transplantation on the legitimacy of law in the recipient countries; and the legal foundations of finance and money.
Since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, she has focused increasingly on the capitalist world. In 2013, she published “A Legal Theory of Finance”, the product of an interdisciplinary research project funded by the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET).[4] The paper received the Allen & Overy Prize from the European Corporate Governance Institute.[5]
Her book The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (2019) shows how capital is coded in law by combining legal devices—such as property rights, collateral, business organization, bankruptcy, and contract law—with different objects, promises, or ideas.[6] The book was named one of the best books of 2019 by the Financial Times[7] and Business Insider.[8] In 2025, she published The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It. The book explains how capitalism has been able to reconstitute itself through private law in the face of regulatory constraints; Pistor argues that transforming capitalism must come through law and requires a normative reset of private law.[9]
In October 2024, Pistor delivered the Adorno Lectures at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt on the constitution of the global monetary system and how it might be reconstituted.[10][11]
