ABSTRACT
The most common topic for geographical analyses of the law–finance nexus has been financial (de)regulation—that is, laws understood as either prohibiting or permitting particular financial practices. From regulation theory, to the varieties of capitalism literature, to the variegated capitalism literature, path-dependent institutional and regulatory change is seen as central to explaining spatial variation in economic relations. The sorts of overlapping legal genealogies, which continue to shape complicated regulatory and jurisdictional questions around the world, need more study, especially in post-colonial spaces. De-regulation—or, more usefully, re-regulation—involves the creation of legal infrastructures that tend to favor private, especially financial, interests over public ones, and often creditors over debtors, in particular. Yet, the law–finance nexus is about far more than whether and how nation-states should regulate finance. N. Brenner, J. Peck, and N. Theodore themselves suggest that variation in regulatory forms is constitutive of variegated capitalism.
