Readers of this blog need no reminder of the pervasive inequalities that define American society. Nor do readers need to be convinced that a perverse concentration of wealth has had profoundly corrosive effects on the viability of American democracy. In a recent article published in the Yale Law Journal, we argue that the traditional approaches to combatting political inequality—campaign finance reform, voting rights, participatory governance—do not go far enough, and we ask what else might be done to redress the fundamental power imbalances that define our politics. We argue that the key lies in building countervailing power among poor and working-class people, and that law can and should be used to facilitate organizing by the poor and working class: not only as workers, but also as tenants, debtors, welfare beneficiaries and others.

At the end of September, labor law scholars gathered at a conference focused on “Labor and the Constitution: Past, Present, and Future.”  There, a group of us considered the problem of “Political Economy and the Constitution”—and the extent to which the Law and Political Economy (LPE) analytical frame can be useful in building a more…

Recently on this blog, Sabeel Rahman and Ganesh Sitaraman detailed the growing interest among public law scholars in questions of power, inequality, and political economy. One feature of the emerging scholarship, they correctly note, is that it directs its attention not primarily to courts, but to legislators and social movements; it focuses not primarily on…