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
What Could LPE Want from a Method?
Law and economics offers a portable, teachable procedure that students can learn in a semester and apply across fields. Should LPE aim to develop a rival procedure of its own, or should it aspire to a different kind of methodological maturity?
Weekly Roundup: Oct 2
Marc Shkurovich on the case for public pharma, Katharina Pistor on the challenges of social democratic reform, and Yochai Benkler on taking social relations as the basic unit of analysis. Plus Niko Bowie and Daphne Renan on 5-4, Nate Holdren on Death Panel, new articles by Sanjukta Paul and Sandeep Vaheesan, and more!
Taking Social Relations as the Basic Unit of Analysis
In capitalism, social relations of production exert outsized force on all other domains, distorting and warping relations of reproduction, protection, and meaning-making without fully annihilating their internal capacity to structure relations in their distinct domains. This approach to understanding society, in which social relations are taken as the basic unit of analysis, helps clarify the place of "the state" in capitalism, the role of law in legitimating capitalism, and the relationship between culture, technology, and politics under capitalism.
The New Institutional Political Economy of Capitalism
Any program of transformative change must reckon with the fact that capitalists have largely succeeded in de-legitimizing existing institutions, including the state itself.