At the Blog
On Monday, Allison Tait continued our symposium on Melinda Cooper’s Counterrevolution, by explaining how reforms to trust law helped super-rich families preserve their wealth in ways previously thought impossible. In 1983, for instance, South Dakota repealed of the Rule Against Perpetuities, which enabled asset-protection trusts to last perpetually, thereby keeping family fortunes safe from erosion through burdensome taxable events as well as the spending of profligate beneficiaries at trust termination. Other states, like Wyoming, Delaware, Alaska, and Nevada, followed South Dakota’s lead and soon joined the ranks of the domestic tax havens. The result, Tait argues, transformed the high-wealth family into something new that looked a lot like something old: the family as a web of property relations strengthened through marriage and other strategic alliances.
On Tuesday, Kate Redburn answered the questions we should all be asking: What is Trad Dad Populism and what kind of political economy does it envision? Offering an exegesis of the new rightwing economic populism, Redburn writes: “The Trad Dad Populist believes that the heterosexual nuclear family is the essential building block of a healthy American political economy. He emphasizes the lost past of the family wage, when a man’s work could support his housewife and children in a life of church, community, and middle-class consumption. The ideology revolves around a theory of social life derived from one reading of Christian morality, in which gender hierarchy is the backbone of social order, combined with nostalgia for a working class composed of white men in blue collar jobs.” This social vision, Redburn argues, should not be seen a merely cynical ploy to capture a few more votes in Ohio, but rather as a foundation on which to construct alternative conservative political economy.
And on Thursday, Sandeep Dhaliwal explained how the manufactured crisis around “retail theft” is just the latest instance in which the US Chamber of Commerce has nurtured a conservative backlash to social movements. As he writes, “Through its attention to retail theft, the Chamber offered a diagnosis of society’s broader social instability. Such instability didn’t have to do with financial and affordability crises, growing inequality, pandemic unpreparedness, or fossil capital. The disorder felt among business, consumers, workers, and entire communities could instead be traced to the national crisis of crime. The solution, naturally, was to ratchet up America’s already exceptional penal system.”
In LPE Land
On Thursday, September 26, join the LPE Project and the AFL-CIO Union Lawyers Alliance (on zoom) for a discussion about the possibilities and limitations of applying existing labor law frameworks to work performed by incarcerated people.
Over at Balkinization, Sam Moyn kicked off a discussion of Jeremy Kessler’s forthcoming article, Law and Historical Materialism.
For those in the big apple, LPE NYC will be holding its first happy hour of the fall at The Half Pint (76 W 3rd St) on October 10th at 6pm! Law students, professors, lawyers, organizers, grad students, and dogs named freddie are welcome.
Cool new article alert: David Pozen and Nikhil Menezes have a new paper, “Looking for the Public in Public Law.”
A hearty congrats to LPE Project co-founder Sabeel Rahman on being named a 2024 Freedom Scholar. As most readers of the Blog will already be aware, Sabeel has been at the forefront of reimagining democratic governance, and, through his work in government, putting that vision into practice. An extremely well-deserved honor!
During NYC Climate week (next week!), the Jain Family Institute will be hosting a series of events, both online and in-person.
And finally, on Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, make sure to tune in to 60 Minutes, as Lesley Stahl sits down with FTC Chair Lina Khan.
