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.
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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
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
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Electronic Surveillance Is Short-Circuiting Employment and Labor Law
Electronic surveillance and automated management should not be understood as merely imposing some new, discrete set of harms on workers. Rather, pervasive employee monitoring should be seen as fundamentally altering the employment context in a way that threatens a wide range of employment and labor law protections. From worker safety, compensation, and classification to workplace discrimination and disability policy, policymakers and regulators must ensure that longstanding protections remain effective in the face of new technology.
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Weekly Roundup: February 2, 2023
Ann Sarnak kicks off a symposium on workplace surveillance and collective resistance, Karen Levy looks at the layering of government, employer, and commercial surveillance in the trucking industry, and Sarrah Kassem examines employee monitoring in Amazon's growing platform ecosystem. Plus, the best of LPE from around the web, including new pieces by Nate Holdren, Kate Jackson, Sandeep Vaheesan, and Lenore Palladino!
Surveillance and Resistance in Amazon’s Growing Platform Ecosystem
Platforms differ markedly in how they use technology to mediate and oversee the labor process. By comparing Amazon's e-commerce platform, where workers are gathered in warehouses, with MTurk, it's distributed digital labor platform, we can see how both the nature of the platform and nature of the work give rise to distinct modes of surveillance, as well as their own possibilities for resistance.
Labor Under Many Eyes: Tracking the Long-Haul Trucker
In 2017, the United States government required that all long-haul truck drivers install electronic logging devices. While this mandate had only limited success in making the roads safer and reducing trucker fatigue, it provided a foundation for additional surveillance by employers and other profit-seeking companies. This layering of government, employer, and commercial surveillance into one apparatus stacked the deck against the workers and may be a bellwether of things to come in other workplaces.