From Asylum Law to the Future of the Global Trading Order, Hans-Jörg Schmidt-Trenz Provides Answers to the Pressing Questions of Our Time

How do we navigate an increasingly complex world? What makes cooperation possible? How can we overcome the omnipresent challenge of opportunism? What role do rules, sanctions, and boundaries play? What will the trade and state order of the future look like? In this book, the author reveals the fundamental mechanisms of social life, the economy, and democracy, highlighting the necessity of the separation of powers and the shadow cast by anarchy. Drawing skillfully on historical examples, he illustrates how the rules that govern our lives operate across all areas of human activity.

Among other topics, he traces connections from criminal law to asylum law, from guiding culture (Leitkultur) to religion, from monetary and competition policy to patent law, from the blessings and pitfalls of democratic majority rule to the independence of the judiciary and central banks. He also identifies the institutional factors that triggered the Industrial Revolution and shaped the rule-based economic, social, and international order whose players and rules are being reshuffled in the twenty-first century.

Hans-Jörg Schmidt-Trenz, who holds both a doctorate and a habilitation in economics, is a distinguished institutional economist and possesses an exceptional combination of theoretical and practical expertise in the world of rules, laws, and organizations. He studied economics and history at Saarland University and the University of Michigan and has served for many years as a professor at both the University of Hamburg and Saarland University. He was the long-serving Chief Executive of the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce, founding president of the Hamburg School of Business Administration, a board member of a Swiss insurance group, and a member of numerous supervisory boards.Schmidt-Trenz has published extensively on institutional economics, the economic analysis of law, and international economic relations.