The Stanford Program in Law & Society is proud to host Professor Barak D. Richman, Edgar P. and Elizabeth C. Bartlett Professor of Law, Duke Law School, who would be talking about his new book “Stateless Commerce: The Diamond Network and the Persistence of Relational Exchange” (Harvard University Press, 2017).

How does Manhattan’s 47th Street diamond district thrive as an ethnic marketplace without lawyers, courts, and state coercion? Barak Richman draws on insider interviews to show why relational exchange based on familiarity, trust, and community enforcement succeeds and what it reveals about the modern state’s limitations in governing the economy.