Monetary law is essential to the functioning of private transactions and international dealings by the state: nearly every legal transaction has a monetary aspect. Money in the Western Legal Tradition presents the first comprehensive analysis of Western monetary law, covering the civil law and Anglo-American common law legal systems from the High Middle Ages up to the middle of the 20th century. Weaving a detailed tapestry of the changing concepts of money and private transactions throughout the ages, the contributors investigate the special contribution made by legal scholars and practitioners to our understanding of money and the laws that govern it. Divided in five parts, the book begins with the coin currency of the Middle Ages, moving through the invention of nominalism in the early modern period to cashless payment and the rise of the banking system and paper money, then charting the progression to fiat money in the modern era. Each part commences with an overview of the monetary environment for the historical period written by an economic historian or numismatist. These are followed by chapters describing the legal doctrines of each period in civil and common law. Each section contains examples of contemporary litigation or statute law which engages with the distinctive issues affecting the monetary law of the period. This interdisciplinary approach reveals the distinctive conception of money prevalent in each period, which either facilitated or hampered the implementation of economic policy and the operation of private transactions.

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Money in the Western Legal Tradition presents the first comprehensive analysis of Western monetary law, covering the civil law and Anglo-American common law legal systems from the High Middle Ages up to the middle of the 20th century.

Money in the western legal tradition

A critical examination of economics’s&nbsp;past and future, and how it needs to change, by one of the most eminent political economists of our time. &nbsp; The dominant view in economics is that money and government should play only a minor role in economic life. Economic outcomes, it is claimed, are best left to the “invisible hand” of the market. Yet these claims remain staunchly unsettled. The view taken in this important new book is that the omnipresence of uncertainty makes money and government essential features of any market economy. &nbsp; Since Adam Smith, classical economics has espoused nonintervention in markets. The Great Depression brought Keynesian economics to the fore, but stagflation in the 1970s brought a return to small-state orthodoxy. The 2008 global financial crash should have brought a reevaluation of that stance; instead the response has been punishing austerity and anemic recovery. This book aims to reintroduce Keynes’s central insights to a new generation of economists, and embolden them to return money and government to the starring roles in the economic drama that they deserve.

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A critical examination of economics’s past and future, and how it needs to change, by one of the most eminent political economists of our time.

Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics

The optimum quantity of money is a normative monetary policy conclusion drawn from the long-run properties of a theoretical model. Most famously associated with Milton Friedman, the optimum calls for a zero nominal rate of interest and thus a steady state of price deflation at the long-run real rate of interest. Although this policy prescription has played a minor role in monetary policy implementation, it has had an enormous influence in monetary theory.

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The optimum quantity of money is a normative monetary policy conclusion drawn from the long-run properties of a theoretical model. 

The Optimum Quantity of Money

<h3>Abstract</h3>The development of Islamic economics has been profound over the last twenty years. The excellent survey of Muslim Economic Thinking by Mohammad Nejatullah Siddiqi (Ahmad 1980) demonstrates the progress that has been made in every avenue of economic thought; the recent work by M. Khan and A. Mirakhor on Islamic Banking in Pakistan and Iran represents the first major study to quantify the effectiveness of an Islamic monetary system. The book by Dr. Umer Chapra, Towards a Just Monetary System, which is the subject matter of this review article, is an attempt, or so we are told by Khurshid Ahmad in the preface, to provide a "comprehensive and interpretative study of the Islamic monetary system" (P. 12), to "integrate theory and practice" and to "give a vigorous analysis of some key concepts" (P.13) in Islamic monetary economics. The reader is therefore given very high expectations of the book as the beginning of the fourth phase of Islamic economies - "a more integrative as well as more critical approach to the entire theory and practice of money and banking in Islam" (P.11). If these expectations are fulfilled Chapra has claim to pioneering work in Islamic macroeconomics but is this the case?

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The development of Islamic economics has been profound over the last twenty years. The excellent survey of Muslim Economic Thinking by Mohammad Nejatullah Siddiqi (Ahmad 1980) demonstrates the progress that has been made in every avenue of economic thought; the recent work by M. Khan and A. Mirakhor on Islamic Banking in Pakistan and Iran represents the first major study to quantify the effectiveness of an Islamic monetary system. 

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