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.
About The LPE Project
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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
A Speakers Bureau of LPE-affiliated professors and practitioners design to help faculty and students to bring LPE scholars to their campuses (even if virtually for now). Information about the amazing work being done by LPE student groups around the country, how to get in touch with them, as well as guidance on starting a student…
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
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A Labor Theory of Negotiation: From Integration to Value Creation
American negotiation theory started as, and for a long time remained, an engagement with labor and class relations. When early scholars developed their theories of negotiation in the context of workplace conflict, they did so in a moment when many workers were familiar enough with Marxist theories of class struggle to readily believe that some differences—for example, between management and labor—were not reconcilable, no matter how one performed in a negotiation. In this context, negotiation theorists aimed to open a space for potentially harmonious group relationships by introducing the concept of “integration”— the idea that labor and management could reorient their interests by creating new common values together.
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Different Paths: Colonization is More than Exploitation
It is an exercise in futility to accept the legitimacy of colonial constructs such as race, gender, property, and state sovereignty, and then work to equalize relations defined in these terms. These constructs are, themselves, the “master’s tools,” designed to perpetuate relations of domination and subordination. Moreover, a more equitable division of the spoils of conquest, should that be possible, wouldn’t change the underlying power dynamics. This is because settler sovereignty has been defined precisely to prevent those under the state’s claimed jurisdiction from exercising self-determination, the right of all peoples to “freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.”
Public Health Law: An LPE Approach w/ Frank Pasquale
Please join the NYU LPE Association this Friday, October 23rd from 12:30-2:00pm for “Public Health Law: An LPE Approach” with Professor Frank Pasquale. It will be a discussion on lawyering in a time of global health crisis and how LPE scholars are grappling with deeply embedded structural biases that skew the political playing field in favor of status-quo cost cutting at the…
Introducing the Journal of Law and Political Economy
The Editors in Chief of JLPE kick off our series celebrating its first issue!