Christine Desan is the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the author of Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014). The book argues that a radical transformation in the way societies produce money ushered in capitalism as a public project. From creating money as a direct credit (coined or not) that linked the political community to members, sovereigns moved to intermediating the public medium. They issued it through investors, nascent central bankers, and enshrined the profit motive as the incentive that regulated money’s production. Those innovations exploded old strictures on money creation and revolutionized attitudes towards self-interest.
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
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Christine Desan, Managing Editor”