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
American Kafala
Under the kafala system, tens of millions of migrant workers across the Levant and Gulf have their legal residency tied to a single employer, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation and state control. In the United States, the Trump administration’s attacks on both undocumented and legally present migrants threaten to consolidate a similar regime of labor extraction and migrant precarity.
Off with the Lotus Eaters
Before the Blog goes on its annual August hiatus, we count down the ten most read posts of 2026 so far, say a fond farewell to our departing student editors, and welcome three new additions to the team.
What Rolls Downhill
Recent calls for mandatory retirement in academia are a reminder that class and other social hierarchies are something like mountains with increasingly dense fog toward their peaks: the higher up one is, the less one understands that upon which and above which one stands.
Cradle to the Grave
As Sam Moyn has recently argued, "class reductionism" fails to explain differentiation along the generational gradient — a pattern clearly visible in economics, politics, and ideology. Yet a clear picture of how age mediates class would reveal not gerontocracy, but capitalism and the fractionated class system it produces.