Value Talk in Legal Academia

"Value" is one of those words so open to diverse interpretations that any choice to engage it probably reveals more about the author than anything else. It may also be the case that addressing value is always on the table, but that it just migrates through different social locations under a variety of professional and lay vernaculars. The vocabularies of reform are no longer in the language of human rights or cultural tolerance, but entangled in discussions of portfolio management, global forex markets, deposit insurance, collateralisation, capitalisation models and tax calculations. In epistemological terms, one might say the move here is to demonstrate not simply that finance is an important terrain of legal governance, but that legal academics traditionally working in non-private law fields are fully legitimate to engage in market design, investment debates, and financial regulation.