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
Moral Orders of Capitalist Legitimacy
In today’s seemingly deglobalizing economy, policymakers across the world are in a quandary over how to regulate foreign firms. Should policymakers prevent foreign firms from attaining dominant market positions in order to prop up domestic industry? Or should they permit foreign firms to establish ownership and control of domestic markets in the hope of accelerating industrialization, economic modernization, and societal transformation? As Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry shows, such decisions are shaped by deeply institutionalized and highly contested moral beliefs about business actors and practices.
Regulating Hours, Dismantling Work
In recent decades, work hours have sharply diverged: high-wage workers are logging more time on the job, while low-wage workers face shrinking hours. Rather than trying to fix this imbalance by creating more work, policymakers should redistribute work through stronger overtime protections and a shorter workweek. Yet for this approach to succeed, highly paid white-collar workers will have to confront their own attachment to a work-based social order.
Weekly Roundup: Feb 20
Victor Pickard on the American media polycrisis and Mariana Pargendler on Brazil’s forgotten legal innovation. Plus, a fellowship in constitutional law and history, a new report on workplace democracy, an interview with Ahilan Arulanantham on third-country removals, Ivana Isailović on the Serbian student protests, Ilias Alami, Tom Chodor, and Jack Taggart on the causes and consequences of the emerging post-multilateral world, and Vanessa Williamson and Aziz Huq on the dissolution of laws that protect public money.
When Workers Pierce the Corporate Veil: Brazil’s Forgotten Innovation
In the early 20th century, foreign companies operating in Brazil would extract profits while using thinly capitalized subsidiaries to directly employ their workers. When things went wrong, workers were left with worthless claims while capital remained safely sheltered in the foreign-located parent companies. To address this issue, in 1937 Brazil adopted a novel legal innovation: imposing joint and several liability on parent companies for labor obligations. Recovering this history reveals that legal innovation often flows from the Global South, that limited liability is neither natural nor universal, and that seemingly technical corporate law doctrines are deeply entangled with questions of distribution, power, and sovereignty.