Desan’s research more generally explores money as a constitutional (small “c”) project that structures material life and governance. Earlier work focused on the adjudicative power of legislatures and sovereign immunity. Desan teaches courses on the constitutional law of money, globalization as a monetary phenomenon, and monetary reform. She is co-founder of Harvard’s Program on the Study of Capitalism, an interdisciplinary project that brings together classes, resources, research funds, and advising on that subject and has taught the Program’s anchoring research seminar, the Workshop on the Political Economy of Modern Capitalism, with Professor Sven Beckert (History, Harvard University) since 2005. Desan is on the Board of the Institute for Global Law and Policy and is an editor of the journal Eighteenth Century Studies. She has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and served on her municipality’s committee on campaign reform for ten years.
Category: Christine Desan
Just Money Profiles
Current Scholarship
Money on the Left Podcast: Money as a Constitutional Project with Christine Desan
Money on the Left Podcast: Money as a Constitutional Project with Christine Desan
The Money on the Left Editorial Collective presents a classic episode from our archives along with a previously unavailable transcript & graphic art. In this episode, we are joined by Christine Desan
Current Scholarship
The Key to Value: The Debate over Commensurability in Neoclassical and Credit Approaches to Money
Christine Desan, Harvard Law School
Neoclassical and credit approaches to money represent dramatically different theories of value.
Policy Spotlight
The Constitution and the Fed after the COVID-19 Crisis
Authors: Christine Desan and Nadav Orian Peer
Current Scholarship
[Recall This Buck I]: Chris Desan on Making Money
Recall this Book Podcast Talks with Christine Desan
This is the first of several RTB episodes about the history of money.
Banking: Intermediation or Money Creation
C. Desan, The Power of Paradigms in Histories of Economic Development
March 12, 2020
Christine Desan, Harvard Law School
An iconic article published by Douglass North and Barry Weingast in 1989 identified the growth of banking
Winter 2020
Banking: Intermediation or Money Creation
Contributors: Morgan Ricks, Marc Lavoie, Robert Hockett, Saule Omarova, Michael Kumhof, Zoltan Jakab, Paul Tucker, Charles Kahn, Daniel Tarullo, Stephen Marglin, Howell Jackson and Christine Desan, Sannoy Das
Courses
Desan, Christine
Course Overview
The Legal Architecture of Globalization: Money, Debt and Development – Overview
Harvard Law School, Spring 2019
Professor Christine Desan
Course Syllabus [pdf] | Course Materials [page]
Course Description: An integrated political economy now covers much of the globe. This course focuses on the monetary structure of that phenomenon as a matter created and contested in law. Trade, extraction, exchange, debt, and economic development – for centuries, all have depended on money as their medium. By examining the changing legal design of money, we will study globalization as a material, ideological, and distributive event of enormous significance.
Early sovereigns prioritized domestic law, both public and private, in developing the rules that provide the basic matrix for exchange. Those rules created the mediums that carry value – including money, credit, and circulating capital. Nation-states today still claim sovereignty over those decisions; they are basic to self-determination and economic development. But the latitude for those decisions had changed. New monetary and financial relations now bind states, individuals, and other entities together and reconfigure the possibilities for their interaction.
We consider the way that political communities assert sovereignty in money and finance, the challenges that occur as different sovereign projects collide, interact, or compete with one another, and the character of the international orders that have resulted, including those of early Europe, the era of the Gold Standard, the Bretton Woods period, and the contemporary system. We will focus, in particular, on the advent and development of finance-based money, a form of liquidity based on sovereign debt and expanded by commercial banks and capital markets. … more
Course Materials
Constitutional Law of Money – Materials
Professor Christine Desan (profile)
Harvard Law School – Fall 2017
Course Overview (Description and Syllabus)
I. Governing at the Material Level
Class 1: The Dollar as a Democratic Medium
Readings Notes and Discussion
Class 2: Money: the Basic Design
Readings Notes and Discussion
Class 3: Money: the Modern Design (a very brief introduction)
Readings Notes and Discussion
II. Experiments with Money: Economic Development, Sovereignty, and the Contest over Federalism (1690-1865)
Class 4: Money and Self-Determination — The Colonial Experience
Readings, Notes and Discussion
Class 5: Money and Nation-building – the Revolution and the Constitution
Readings, Notes and Discussion
Class 6: The New Federalist Approach to Money: Public Debt and National Banking
Readings, Notes and Discussion
Class 7: Revising Public Obligation: The Contracts Clause and Article I, Sec. 10
Readings, Notes and Discussion
Class 8: State Development Strategies in an Illiquid World: Banks and Corporations
Readings, Notes and Discussion
Class 9: Federalism Contested: Jackson and the Battle over the Bank(s)
Readings, Notes and Discussion
Class 10: Free Banking: The High Tide of State Power
Readings, Notes and Discussion
III. Configuring Federal Monetary Power (1865-Present)
Class 11: National Banking I: Federal Entry into Retail Banking
Readings, Notes and Discussion
Class 12: National Banking II: Constitutional Claims to Credit Outside the Commercial System
Readings, Notes and Discussion
Class 13: Conceptualizing the Modern Market: Gold, Futures, and Economic Expertise
Readings, Notes and Discussion
Class 14: “Fed-eralizing” the Monetary System
Guest lecturer: Prof. Nadav Orian Peer, Tulane Law School
Readings, Notes and Discussion
Class 15: Liberating the Fed: the Movement towards Discretionary Monetary Policy
Readings, Notes and Discussion
Class 16: Credit Allocation as a Political Project
Readings, Notes and Discussion
Class 17: Market Funding and Financialization
Readings, Notes and Discussion
Class 18: The Financial Crisis
Readings, Notes and Discussion
Class 19: The Constitutional Charge of Administrative Accountability and Independence: The Fed and Monetary Policy
Readings, Notes and Discussion
IV: Money in Constitutional Dimension: Contemporary Issues
Class 20: The Constitutional Right to Credit?… more
Course Overview
Constitutional Law of Money – Overview
Professor Christine Desan (profile)
Harvard Law School – Spring 2019
Syllabus | Course Materials (coming soon)
Course Description:
According to one of the framers, the “soul of the Constitution” was the clause allocating authority over money. Over the following centuries, money has remained at the center of debates over governance, including the division between state and federal sovereigns, American approaches to economic development and social welfare, the scope of judicial review, federal preemption, and the allocation of fundamental decisions about material distribution. The authority of the Federal Reserve, for example, apparently includes the ability to make monetary policy decisions that move hundreds of billions of dollars. This 3-credit course picks up an essential line of constitutional debate and determination, including those concerning the national debt, the contracts clause, state police powers, the Legal Tender Cases, the Gold Clause cases, and the role and responsibilities of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve.
Course Materials
The Legal Architecture of Globalization: Money, Debt, and Development – Materials
Harvard Law School, Spring 2019
Professor Christine Desan
Introduction and Overview
Class 01: Money, Debt, and Development: Challenges and Change in a Globalizing World
Reading, Background and Discussion
I. A Baseline: Money and its Design in the Early Western World
Class 02: Course Overview and Introduction to Money as a Legal Institution
Reading, Background and Discussion
Class 03: Commodity Money and Medieval Constitutionalism (the Law on Money Creation and Debasement)
Reading, Background and Discussion
Class 04: Medieval Money, Development, and the Law on Exchange (Usury and Nominalism)
Reading, Background and Discussion
Class 05: Sovereignty and International Law in an Age of Bullion: the Early Modern Settlement
Reading, Background and Discussion
II. The Early Modern Quartet: Modern Money, Public Debt, Securities Markets, and Commercial Banking in the Era of European Expansion
Class 06: The Invention of Modern (Bank-based) Money
Reading, Background and Discussion
Class 07: The New Public Law of Money: Public Debt and the Ascendance of Creditors’ Rights
Reading, Background and Discussion
Class 08: Securities Markets and the Accommodation of International Law: the Rise of Capital Out of the South Sea Debacle
Reading, Background and Discussion
Class 09: The Development of Commercial Banking
Reading, Background and Discussion
Class 10: Time-out – Contemporary Money-Making (a short introduction to the modern Fed, commercial banks, and the way they Interact)
Reading, Background and Discussion
III. The “First Globalization”: the International Gold Standard and its Legacies
Class 11: Modern Markets as a Radical Innovation: Power, Problems, and Commentary
Reading, Background and Discussion
Class 12: The Quartet on the Stage of Empire: Finance in the Ottoman World (i.e.,… more
Podcast
MDM 2018: Welcoming Remarks
Podcast: Christine Desan opens the first Money as a Democratic Medium conference.
Recognizing money and credit as public projects exposes issues of democratic purpose and possibility. In a novel focus, this conference makes those issues central.
Podcast
MDM 2018: History and Theory
Roundtable
Jeffrey Sklansky – University of Illinois at Chicago
Stefan Eich – Princeton, Society of Fellows
Stephen Marglin – Harvard University
Scott Ferguson – University of South Florida
Christine Desan – Harvard Law School
Moderator: Roy Kreitner, Tel Aviv University School of Law
Podcast
MDM 2018- Wrapping Up
Nadav Orian Peer – Tulane Law School
Patricia McCoy – Boston College Law School
Saule Omarova – Cornell Law School
Iain Frame – Kent Law School
Thank you – Christine Desan