The importance of Graeber's work goes well beyond money and debt. In my view, anybody interested in building up a renewed legal realism that can stand up to not just law-and-economics but also the updated formalism of liberal analytic moral/legal theory would be well served to familiarize themselves with his writings.
Learned Hand once described the task of the Federal Trade Commission as “discover[ing] and mak[ing] explicit those unexpressed standards of fair dealing which the conscience of the community may progressively develop.” In a previous post, I argued that moving consumer protection law beyond consumer sovereignty requires recovering this way of thinking, common among Progressives and…
The consumer is at the center of the neoliberal’s moral universe. For both neoclassical welfarists and Hayekian moralists, the consumer is the Everyman. For, whatever else we do, we are all consumers. The “free market” has value because it forces the firms that control the process of production and distribution to compete for our business.…
This is the introductory post in a series on the Methods of Political Economy. In their Law & Economics textbook, Robert Cooter and Thomas Ulen ask: “Why has the economic analysis of law succeeded?” Their answer: “Economics provide[s] a scientific theory to predict the effects of legal sanctions on behavior….This theory surpasses intuition, just as…
Ryan Doerfler has an article over at Jacobin reacting in part to my argument that current law enables the Secretary of Education to cancel as much student debt as she wants by using her enforcement discretion. Professor Doerfler is not so much arguing against my proposal (for which he has some flattering words) as he…
NB: This post is part of the “Piercing the Monetary Veil” symposium. Other contributions can be found here. Luke Herrine — This blog has already hosted several examples of re-thinkings of the nature of money and its relationship to law and power, most recently in a symposium on LPE Contributor Mehrsa Baradaran’s book on money…