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), a book arguing that a radical transformation in the way societies produce money ushered in capitalism as a public project.  As she argues there and elsewhere, a particular kind of monetary hardwiring based on public debt, national (central) banks, commercial banks, and capital markets defines what we have come to assume as “the economy” in the modern world.

She is the founding editor of a website, Justmoney.org, that explores monetary and financial design as important vectors of governance.  She also co-founded Harvard’s Program on the Study of Capitalism and taught the Program’s anchoring research seminar, the Workshop on the Political Economy of Modern Capitalism, with Professor Sven Beckert (History, Harvard University) from 2005 to 2015.  A volume of scholarship presented there is American Capitalism:  New Histories (Columbia University Press, 2018). Desan also recently edited A Cultural History of Money in the Age of Enlightenment (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).

Desan’s earlier work focused on the adjudicative power of legislatures and sovereign immunity.  She 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