Antitrust law is important not only for its potential in reforming our current economic system, but also analytically, because of law’s irreducible role in structuring economic competition and coordination. Contra any picture of markets operating via quasi-automatic mechanisms, the organization and operations of any market are as much a product of contingent rules as any law of nature.

How should we understand the relationship between Marxism and antitrust? To what extent do these traditions involve conflicting methods and assumptions? And, despite their differences, can we imagine a constructive give and take, where the two intellectual programs nonetheless align into a useful division of labor?

Recent public initiatives to manufacture insulin highlight both the promise and pitfalls of the new politics of “abundance.” Although states are capable of producing high-quality, affordable medicines, these efforts inevitably face resistance from powerful private interests. Without recognizing this as a central obstacle and building the political will to overcome it, plans to expand public production, in healthcare or elsewhere, are unlikely to succeed.

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.

For decades, the rules of international trade helped cement U.S. firms at the top of global value chains. Should Trump’s unapologetic embrace of tariffs be understood as part of a broader loss of faith in those rules among American policymakers? Or is it something else entirely — a bid to remake the relationship between capital and political power within the United States itself?

To kick off another school year, two 3L LPE fans (and Blog editors) reflect on what LPE has to offer to new law students.