ALT "among both supporters and skeptics, the same question arises: Is the city the right arena for this kind of social democracy, one focused on confronting private power head-on? This question of scale, while no doubt pressing, misses something important: sewer socialism is as much about the sewer as it is about socialism. Our local, physical infrastructure is the most important social infrastructure we have, and power over it should be localized because it is already local. We should not hold local leaders accountable for bringing down the entire capitalist system; rather, we should make sure they are building and supporting the polity needed for such a process to take shape."

ALT This bold version of legal institutionalism ends up reifying both law and political economy: the fundamental plurality of legal claims and institutional forms is erased and so is the question of which ideological and material factors lead some legal arguments and institutions to prevail over others in particular historical conjunctures. One need not adopt the historical materialist answer to this question, which prioritises social relationships of production and reproduction, to nevertheless accept that the inability of legal institutionalism to even raise this question in its own terms is a major weakness of Pistor’s theoretical framework.