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
Inside the Failure to Regulate Stablecoins
From legislative paralysis to regulatory fragmentation to strategic incoherence, Democrats have spent the past five years squandering opportunities to assert control over the future of digital currencies. To reverse course, progressives need to embrace a coordinated approach that balances innovation, privacy, and systemic risk.
Weekly Roundup: Dec 20
Rohan Grey and Amanda Parsons on the law and political economy of cryptocurrency, Sandeep Vaheesan on antitrust reform as an instrument for democratizing economic life, Zohra Ahmed and Madiha Tahir on the Trump administration's escalation against Venezuela, and Quinn Slobodian on the dim prospects of centrist post-neoliberalism. Plus, a "freedom from want" writing award, the birth of a new NYC policy shop, a look at how money does and doesn't influence elections, a tutorial on the Netflix-Warner Bros Merger, and a new paper on the jurisprudential question of our times: how should you think about a Supreme Court that doesn’t care what you think?
Post-Neoliberalism is the New Centrism
At a recent convening devoted to the death of neoliberalism, what emerged was less a rupture with the past than a centrist project of status-quo stabilization.
Beginning with Empire
U.S. attacks on alleged drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean have been widely condemned for violating international law. Yet much of this criticism, by focusing narrowly on the Trump administration's military excesses, risks repeating a familiar mistake: debating how the United States wages war while leaving unquestioned why it wages it at all.