Capitalism and the Equity Fetish

This book is a provocative, interdisciplinary, and critical appraisal of civil justice, property, and the laws that shape and command them within capitalism. Dr. Herian’s book is both a complementary and countervailing narrative to many mainstream legal accounts, one that critiques core and influential areas of legal knowledge and practice.  Central to the book’s thesis is a rich collaboration of ideas and perspectives that consider what is at stake from institutions, concepts, and practices of equity and civil justice tied to the subjective psychic life and the unconscious desires of capitalist stakeholders. The book aims to address several questions, including how capitalism has imagined and shaped equity and civil justice since the nineteenth century; how capitalism acts as a well-spring of desire for forms of justice that wrap-around and sustain complex frameworks of private property power and ownership; and how equity supports agile neoliberal strategies of justice and reason in the twenty-first century.
​Dr. Robert Herian is Senior Lecturer at The Open University Law School (UK) and Co-Founder of the Equity and Trusts Research Network. Robert’s research encompasses equity, trusts, and property law; psychoanalysis; legal history; critical theory and philosophy.  He lives in Northwest England with his partner, Chloe, and their border terrier, Billy.