Collateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets

(University of Chicago Press) Riles explores the uses of collateral in the financial markets as a regulatory device for stabilizing market transactions. The way that collateral operates is paradigmatic of a class of low-profile but indispensable activities and practices that are often ignored when we think about how markets should work and be governed. Riles is the Jack G. Clarke ’52 professor of Far Eastern legal studies, professor of anthropology, and director of the Clarke Program in East Asian Law and Culture at Cornell University.