What is LPE? Is it a reaction to law and economics? Does it have a method? What is its normative north star? At this year's ALPE conference, Amy Kapczynski, Corinne Blalock, Aslı Bâli, Sabeel Rahman, Angela Harris, and Yochai Benkler offered their best answers to these questions in two sentences or less.
As we work toward a durable democratic future, a commitment to legislative primacy can serve as an orienting north star. Reaching that goal, however, will require using both legislative and executive tools, especially while we are working with an imperfect, hobbled, and significantly co-opted legislature.
In a moment of institutional unraveling and authoritarian threat, legal scholars and law review editors should resist the "Part IV" reflex and make space for bolder analyses, longer horizons, and more collective ways of imagining change.
The Trump administration is simultaneously dismantling, weaponizing, and centralizing state capacities in order to enact a reactionary vision of administration — one which seeks to roll back efforts by prior generations to equalize economic and social relations. In contrast to this vision, progressives ought to aspire to a regulatory state whose purpose is to prevent domination. This alternative vision can guide us in deciding which forms of administrative power we should build and which we should actively work to restrain.
In the midst of the chaos, an ambitious policy agenda beckons. Elizabeth Wilkins, Chiraag Bains, Bharat Ramamurti, Samuel Bagenstos, Shilpa Phadke, and K. Sabeel Rahman reflect on how to rebuild, rather than merely reproduce, what came before the wreckage.
The Supreme Court’s recent administrative law decisions represent a fundamental shift in both political and economic power. In response, we must not settle for simply restoring the status quo ante. Instead, the task for an LPE approach to the administrative state requires answering a more foundational question: what would effective, equitable, and democratic governance look like?
