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LPE Blog Managing Editor Application

Apr 13, 2021

The Law and Political Economy Blog, published since 2017, is a platform for the development of law and political economy scholarship and community. It provides a forum for discussion and debate, and makes it easier for scholars, students, practitioners, and organizers to access and engage LPE work. This facilitates the extension of the LPE community beyond the legal academy, grounding LPE analysis both in praxis and in interdisciplinary debates.

The Managing Editor is responsible for ensuring that the LPE Blog publishes posts that further this mission. This role involves editorial duties such as soliciting posts, reviewing unsolicited posts, and revising and editing drafts. It also involves managerial duties such as ensuring that the Editorial Board meets on a regular basis, supervising a staff of 3-5 law student editors, and coordinating the schedule of posts. The Managing Editor is an integral member of the LPE Project and is expected to collaborate with the other employees of and participants in the LPE Project to set and achieve common goals.

As currently structured, the LPE Blog is governed by an Editorial Board that consists of the Executive Director of the LPE Project, one of the Faculty Directors of the LPE Project, four Faculty Board Members, and one current and one former Managing Editor. The Editorial Board is tasked with setting the editorial priorities of the Blog, and also plays a role in soliciting, developing, and writing posts. The Managing Editor is both a participant in the collective decision-making process of the Editorial Board and the person responsible for coordinating that decision-making process and ensuring that its decisions are carried out.

The LPE Blog’s editorial staff–the people actually responsible for editing the content of blog posts and posting them on the blog–consists of the Managing Editor and 3-5 law students who serve as Lead Editors. Lead Editors meet regularly independently of the Editorial Board, and it is the Managing Editor’s responsibility to coordinate those meetings and to otherwise facilitate planning and decision-making among the editorial team. It is also the Managing Editor’s responsibility to supervise Lead Editors’ editing and to perform whichever editorial duties Lead Editors do not perform.

The Managing Editor position is designed to be part-time, averaging approximately 20 hours of work per week. The ideal start date would be August 1, with the possibility of beginning one or two months earlier on a part-time basis (a few hours a week) to enable training and a smooth transition. Pay is $35,000 per year and, as a part-time position, does not include benefits. Ideally the candidate would be able to spend regular time in New Haven, though that is not a requirement. The ideal candidate has a J.D., understands and shares the intellectual and organizational aims of LPE, and is extraordinarily well-organized, with superb writing and editing skills. The position is an especially good fit for people preparing to enter the law teaching market in the near future, given its part-time nature and the regular interaction with scholars and scholarly work. Applications from candidates with direct experience of the class, race, gender, ability, sexuality, and other hierarchies that LPE seeks to critically analyze are strongly encouraged.

Application Details

Applicants should send an email to sarah.harwood@yale.edu with the following documents. All document titles should begin LASTNAME_FIRSTNAME

  • A cover letter describing their interest in the position
  • A curriculum vitae
  • Contact information for three references
  • One or more writing samples that display your academic and/or public facing writing abilities.  Ideally these should be solo-authored and not edited by others. 

Applications should be submitted by May 15, 2021.

Background

Law and Political Economy is a line of inquiry rooted in a commitment to a more egalitarian, inclusive, and democratic society, that explores the various ways that law structures and is structured by political economy. At a theoretical level, LPE begins from the presumption that law gives shape to the relations between politics and the economy at every point; law is the mediating institution that ties together politics and the social provisioning process. At a political level, LPE begins from opposition to the neoliberal hegemony that has characterized the past 50 years or so, and to the overlapping systems of domination that neoliberalism has reinforced and legitimated. Thinkers who identify with LPE have this much in common, though they adopt a variety of methodological approaches and occupy multiple points on the left-most portion of the political spectrum.