S.J.D. Candidate
iorellanagarci at sjd.law.harvard.edu
Dissertation
The Constitutional Foundations of Money and Finance
My dissertation explores how constitutional law shapes financial systems. Building on a growing body of scholarship that characterizes money—the cornerstone of financial systems—as a legal phenomenon and focusing on the U.S. as a case study, it is driven by three overarching questions: What is the nature of the relationship between monetary systems and sovereign states; how do constitutions help mediate tensions between government and non-government financial institutions; and to what extent can principles of constitutionalism inform the design of these institutions to help craft a more democratically responsive financial system? In engaging with these questions, my research combines legal history and doctrine, political theory, and economic analysis, and aims to bring the fields of constitutional law and financial regulation into closer dialogue.
The first part of my dissertation seeks to shed light on monetary sovereignty as a legal concept in American constitutional law. It interrogates the extent to which, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, modern western state theory and the Anglo-American legal tradition understood the configuration of a polity’s monetary system as a sovereign right to be exercised through the state’s government institutions. My working hypothesis is that ontological and teleological rationales recurrently justified the recognition of such a right; that, as practically exercised, the right was deemed to be wide in scope; and that the aforementioned theory and tradition informed the U.S. Constitution in ways that can provide valuable interpretative resources and help better understand the institutional design choices through which the Constitution organizes the exercise of that right.
The second part of my dissertation focuses on the institutional architecture through which the United States exercises monetary sovereignty today. It starts from the premise that the exercise of monetary sovereignty involves making legally binding decisions over (i) the legal configuration of the American polity’s monetary system, (ii) the control of the currency supply, and (iii) the allocation of newly-issued currency. While the Constitution allocates these functions to Congress, Congress has largely delegated the day-to-day operation of the last two functions on a system comprised by the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department, and a network of non-government financial institutions. Against this backdrop, my dissertation explores the extent to which this institutional architecture may be deemed consistent with the normative underpinnings of the separation of powers as a principle of democratic constitutionalism. My working hypothesis is that constitutional principles such as the separation of powers may—and to some extent already do—inform the design of financial institutions to help safeguard individual rights by preventing the overconcentration of power, guarantee the effective pursuit of public policies through a functional division of labor, and promote democratic accountability and legitimacy by aggregating different institutional perspectives and goals into a provisional understanding of the American polity’s common good that mediates tensions in social values such as economic growth, macrofinancial stability, government funding, and wealth equality.
Fields of Research and Supervisors
- Functions and Regulation of Monetary and Financial Institutions with Professor Howell E. Jackson, Harvard Law School, Principal Faculty Supervisor
- Political Economy of Money with Professor Christine A. Desan, Harvard Law School
- Comparative Constitutional Law: Constitutionalism, Constitutional Principles, and Economic Institutions, with Professor Vicki C. Jackson, Harvard Law School
Additional Research Interests
- Monetary and Fiscal Policy
- Contract Law and Financial Instruments
- Corporate Governance
- Administrative Law
- Antitrust Law
- History of Capitalism
Education
- Harvard Law School, S.J.D. Candidate 2022 – Present
- Harvard Law School, LL.M. 2019
- Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Licenciado en Derecho 2014
Academic Appointments and Fellowships
- Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University, Fall 2026—Spring 2027, Edmond J. Safra Graduate Fellow in Ethics
- Program on Law and Political Economy at Harvard Law School, Fall 2025–Spring 2026, Student Fellow
- Harvard University Department of Economics, Fall 2025–Spring 2026, Teaching Fellow (Section Leader) Principles of Economics (Microeconomics) & Principles of Economics (Macroeconomics)
- Harvard Law School, Fall 2025, Teaching Fellow, Legal Research, Writing and Analysis I
- Harvard Law School, Spring 2025, Teaching Fellow, Legal Architecture of Globalization
- Harvard Law School, Fall 2024, Teaching Fellow, Comparative Constitutional Law
- Harvard Law School, Spring 2024, Teaching Fellow, Constitutional Law: Money and the Making of American Capitalism
- Harvard Law School, Fall 2023–Spring 2026, Graduate Program Fellow, Law Teaching Colloquium Coordinator
- Harvard Law School, Fall 2022–Spring 2024, Graduate Program Fellow, LLM Writing Workshop Advisor
- Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 2009–2018, Teaching assistant, Economic Law
- Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 2010–2018, Teaching assistant, Constitutional Law
- Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 2012–2018, Teaching assistant, Private Law
Representative Publications
- Ignacio Orellana García, Market Manipulation in the Age of Machines: An Analysis of Two Trading Strategies, in José Manuel Martínez Sierra (ed.), Blockchain, Fintech and the Law (Tirant Lo Blanch, 2022)
- Ignacio Orellana García ¿Cuánto es suficiente? Separación de funciones, proporcionalidad y criterios de graduación de sanciones administrativas a propósito de la potestad sancionatoria del Consejo Nacional de Televisión, in Sentencias Destacadas 2021 (Ediciones LyD, 2022)
Additional Information
- Languages: English (fluent), Spanish (native), French (basic), German (basic)
Last Updated: June 21, 2026