The Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project brings together a network of scholars, practitioners, and students working to develop innovative intellectual, pedagogical, and political interventions to advance the study of political economy and law. Our work is rooted in the insight that politics and the economy cannot be separated and that both are constructed in essential respects by law. We believe that developments over the last several decades in legal scholarship and policy helped to facilitate rising inequality and precarity, political alienation, the entrenchment of racial hierarchies and intersectional exploitation, and ecological and social catastrophe. We aim to help reverse these trends by supporting scholarly work that maps where we have gone wrong, and that develops ideas and proposals to democratize our political economy and build a more just, equal, and sustainable future.
LPE project
Learn
A variety of resources designed to help faculty and students learn more about LPE, including syllabi from LPE and LPE-related courses, primers on topics such as neoliberalism and legal realism, as well as videos from a number of events we have held over the last year.
Go to LearnEngage
Information about the amazing work being done by LPE student groups, as well as guidance on starting a student group on your own campus! A bureau of affiliated professors and practitioners designed to help faculty and students to bring LPE scholars to their campuses!
Go to EngageEvents
A compendium of upcoming (and past) events put on by the LPE Project, LPE student groups, and other organizations in the LPE ecosystem.
Go to Events
Weekly Roundup: Dec 5
Madison Condon on climate change and externalities-thinking, Colleen Carrol on MAGA's attempt to outflank democrats on college affordability, and Alvin Velazquez and Christopher Hampson on what LPE and the Bible have in common. Plus, Zephyr Teachout on the rise of MLMs, Susannah Glickman and Nic Johnson on the political economy of Trump's second term, David Dayen on algorithmic pricing, an interview with Stuart Schrader on policing, Paul Kelleher on whether Coase can be reclaimed for LPE, a new report on the political economy of the US media system, and hot new articles on tax base fragmentation and the radical roots of the representative jury.
What LPE and the Christian Bible Have in Common
In today’s polarized political discourse, it is easy to forget that the Bible’s economic values align better with LPE’s market critiques than with the neoliberal right’s twentieth-century synthesis. And it would be a mistake to surrender these resources to the post-liberal right.
The Dark Doppelganger of Affordable Higher Education
In the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, the Trump administration included a brilliant bit of faux-populism: a five-year tuition freeze. The proposal creates the illusion that the right is taking decisive action to address affordability, while obfuscating its larger plan to abandon higher education as a public good. To prevent MAGA from outflanking and corrupting a popular left position, we must embrace ambitious solutions that will actually address the high cost of attending college.
Is Climate Change an Externality?
Environmental harms are often cast as externalities, even by those seeking to emphasize their urgency. Yet the major modern environmental statutes, written before America's neoliberal turn toward Coasean thinking, expressly rejected the use of economic analysis in designing pollution regulation. What does this history teach us, and how might our thinking shift if we rejected the idea that climate change is best thought of as an externality?