 You can't see the DNA of any plants or animals from the outside. Neither do most people see the law. Only the lawyers see the law. We have a duality of law where we have constraints and then we have enabling legal institutions and we can use the latter to get around the former. And lawyers know how to do that. That's one of the most powerful ways in which wealth is created today. The legal system, which is governed in principle by the idea that everybody is equal under the law, can nonetheless be used by very powerful strategic actors to create private wealth for themselves. Until 1880, most of the source of wealth was in rural land, which was protected by legal devices. What came in instead? Legal modules, private law, contract law, corporate law used to flip objects, ideas, promises into wealth-generating assets. Asset holders have found lawyers who have coded their assets in law and have amounted resources that they can use then again to hire better lawyers and code more assets in law. Enormous amounts of wealth have been created with capital. And if you critique capitalism, people typically point to the Soviet Union and say, there is nothing else that could possibly work. And yet there's something fundamentally wrong with capitalism. It is unjust. We have seen many upheavals of capitalism lately. There are structures built in that make the system both relatively fragile and at the same time create major advantages for some at the very top. We created this mechanism in the 19th century in an age of capital scarcity, but it's not clear that we want to maintain that and still allow investors to make a lot of money as if the world had not changed around us. As we rethink how to deal with problems such as inequality, such as climate change, understanding how the law really works is of critical importance.