On Friday, we gave you the big list of everything we published in 2024. Today, we offer a bit of curation, as our editorial staff highlights some of their favorite posts.
Elliot
At a moment where the legal left is debating whether to reject or embrace constitutionalism, one highlight of this year was our symposium on Aziz Rana’s The Constitutional Bind. In his introduction to the symposium, Rana argues that constitutional veneration was a distinctively twentieth-century development tied to America’s rise as a global superpower. A series of thoughtful responses push back on Rana’s argument in different ways. Willy Forbath argues that the left should instead embrace a tradition of redemptive constitutionalism. Maggie Blackhawk suggests that abandoning the constitutionalism risks erasing the memories of American colonialism and undercutting the forms of self-determination that communities colonized by the United States have crafted. And David Pozen questions whether constitutional veneration actually poses a significant obstacle to democratic reform.
The rest of my favorite posts from this year could all be described as seeking to uncover the legal and political underpinnings of the crises we are currently living through. That is especially true when it comes to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Take, for instance, Ntina Tzouvala’s articulation of the structural, political-economy informed understanding of genocide advanced by South Africa at the ICJ. Or Darryl Li’s exploration of the web of legal forms that make U.S. imperialism possible through the lens of a specific commodity: the 155mm artillery shell. And, as universities cracked down on pro-Palestinian protest and advocacy, the blog featured important posts on the political economy of higher education. That included Amy Kapczynski’s reflections on free speech at universities in the wake of Claudine Gay’s resignation, and David Pozen’s account of the ”presidentialization” of the modern university.
Liz
Hello LPE blogosphere! I’ve organized my end of year selections into pairings, offering suggested double features for your content-consumption delight.
The first duo on the menu is one themed on the continuing ascendence of financialized capital assets operating within unregulated equity markets – Melinda Cooper’s “The Rise of Neoliberal Public Finance” and Lenore Palladino’s “Private Financial Markets are Eating the World.” To cleanse your pallet after this sobering start, I recommend pairing Chloe Thurston and Emily Zackin’s “Can Personal Debt Mobilize Voters?” with Shai Karp’s “Rent Strikes as a Righteous Form of Resistance.” Thurston and Zackin explicate how we can build an organized constituency out of something seemingly “technocratic and apolitical” like debt relief, while Karp argues that, once organized, collectives like tenant unions can wield political tactics like rent strikes to counter organized real estate capital.
Delving back into the dark, Alex Gourevitch’s “The Machiavellis of the Market: Entrepreneurs Against Democracy” and Sarena Martinez’s “Facing the Quasi-Sovereignty of Insurers” together paint a picture of the way our corporate overlords, in Gourevitch’s words, “rule us without ruling through politics,” and, in Martinez’s, “effectively determine who can access the economy and at what price.” But fear not. Our next set of posts show the underlying power of labor. David Boehm and Lynn Ta, both attorneys at the National Labor Relations Board, point readers to the Norris-LaGuardia Act’s protection of the right to “freedom of labor,” while Kate Andrias offers another tool for the organized working class – the Constitution – forecasting a “constitutional clash between labor and business, echoing the fights of the early twentieth century.” To finish out the Norma Rae portion of the menu, I suggest a pair of posts on regulatory approaches to counter corporate domination. First, an interview with Ganesh Sitaraman where he explains how “Networks, Platforms, and Utilities (NPUs)” law can be used to build a “system of regulated competition” that addresses acute problems in industries where “competition is unlikely,” like air travel. And second, a post by Eamon Coburn arguing that government enforcers should regulate abusive labor practices – like substandard wages and noncompete agreements – as unfair methods of competition.
And lastly, I’d be remiss if I did not provide a dessert pairing for those jonesing for LPE perspectives to help parse the 2024 election results. “The Political Effects of Neoliberalism” by Ilyana Kuziemko, Nicolas Longuet Marx, and Suresh Naidu seems especially prescient. All the way back in February, they used quantitative methods to show that while individuals with fewer years of education prefer “predistribution” policies (like minimum wage laws, pro-union and protectionist trade policies, and public employment), the Democratic Party has increasingly shifted towards redistributionist policies to please the educated donor class, shifting away from their working-class base in the process. More recently, Kate Redburn’s “The Political Economy of Trad Dad Populism” explains how a new class of conservatives have seized on this rejection of neoliberal economics to further “a theory of social life derived from one reading of Christian morality, in which gender hierarchy is the backbone of social order, combined with a nostalgia for a working class composed of white men in blue collar jobs.” And on that blistering note, happy reading and best wishes to you and yours as we work arm in arm to build the world as it should be in 2025!
Chloe
In last year’s roundup, one editor asked: how can LPE clarify overlaps between the siege on Gaza and questions LPE has long sought to address? A year later and more than a year into an unending American-abetted genocide, the blog pieces that resonated most with me were those that challenged us to see Gaza not as a distant issue, but as a struggle that is tied up with the core concerns of LPE.
Ntina Tzouvala helps us understand that, through the adoption of a political-economic framing, the settler colonial project can be seen as “a matrix of genocide,” which dispels claims of genocide as an extreme aberration. Importantly, she reminds us that Gaza is a prime example of how “history and political economy are not simply a lens that we may or may not choose to use depending on our methodological and political commitments.” In a complementary piece, Darryl Li articulates how American imperialism subjugates Palestine not only through unconditional military aid to Israel, but also by manipulating the arms supply chain through covert, politically-fueled agreements.
How do we fight back against such extreme injustice bolstered by the neoliberal and imperial infrastructure? A thoughtful collection of perspectives suggested how, despite its limitations, international law can be leveraged to expose inconsistencies in the imperialist project and further Palestinian liberation “within and beyond the law.” Or maybe we should reflect on other engines of change: Kate Yoon’s interview with Vincent Bevins invited us to think about why recent mass social movements have failed, the power vacuums they leave behind, and whose voices come to dominate those spaces.
Other contributors showed how solidarity with Palestinian liberation activates the most repressive functions of the neoliberal state back home, as represented by the securitization of universities, labor injunctions and temporary restraining orders issued against worker-led Palestine solidarity movements, and government efforts to dismantle “foreign adversary-controlled” platforms. Chaumtoli Huq asked us to consider whether the issue of Palestine, in part, represents a referendum on U.S. democracy, which may help explain these reactionary steps.
In an increasingly turbulent political context, we must internalize these lessons of intertwined resistance and avoid falling into traps that pit movements against each other. As the insightful symposium on Melinda Cooper’s Counterrevolution suggests, neoliberalism often succeeds by “coopting the moral arguments of the equality movements” to shore up existing power hierarchies. Jacob Hamburger’s analysis of the mass rightward shift in immigration policy concretizes these learnings, and he calls for an industrial policy that critically examines the economic advantages of immigration.
2024 was bleak, and we have a difficult road ahead of us. But if there is anything we can take away from this year, it is that solidarity is more important now than ever. And, as Sabeel Rahman reminds us in his consideration of rebuilding the administrative state post-Loper Bright, we cannot “settle for simply restoring the status quo ante.” Building a truly inclusive, equitable, and just world requires resisting the fear-mongering tactics of the neoliberal project and remaining steadfast in connecting the political and economic dimensions of our shared struggles.
Eve
As the year ends and a second Trump term looms, I want to highlight some posts that interrogate shifting power dynamics and identify ways to protect, contest, or resist these changes.
One such post is Luke Herrine’s essay on the astounding transformation in federal consumer protection, which involved a shift away from neoliberal tenants (self-regulating market, the power of consumer choice, the sufficiency of disclosure) and towards interventions that strategically correct for power asymmetries. While it’s not clear what will happen under an FTC headed by Andrew Ferguson, Herrine predicts that at least some of these changes will outlast the Biden administration. Similarly, after a summer of judicial power grabs by the Supreme Court, Sabeel Rahman helped us see that these decisions aren’t really about “big” vs. “small” government or “government” vs. “the market,” but instead are attempts to recreate or preserve relations of domination. Rahman proposes a new way forward that focuses on the mission and machinery of a new administrative state. Matthew Lawrence, meanwhile, offered an analysis of legally-empowered super groups that encouraged readers to view these lobbying entities as fertile grounds for political organizing in the coming years; and Shai Karp’s essay on the Kansas City rent strike, which analyzes the tenant-landlord relationship through the lens of domination, defended rent strikes as a form of justified resistance against unaccountable landlords.
In 2024, the blog also published many perceptive posts describing how legal theory and political strategies have shaped (and are still shaping) our institutions and social frameworks. For any law student, I recommend Darren Bush, Mark Glick, and Gabriel Lozada’s brief history on the influence of the law and economics movement. Another post, by James Goodwin and Beau Baumann, begins with a prime example of this influence: recent efforts by conservatives to institutionalize the cost-benefit analysis within Congress. Pointing to the significance of this possibility, Goodwin and Baumann lament that LPE has largely overlooked legislative procedure and politics and argue that LPE scholars should strategize around Capitol Hill’s procedural handbook. Another stellar post in this category was Kate Redburn’s dissection of a new strain of conservatism—termed “trad dad populism”—that blends anti-woke and protectionist economic policies. Crucially, Redburn writes: “Even if Trad Dad Populism has not yet had much policy bite, what’s important to see is how this social vision forms the foundation for a (much shakier) economic plan.”
Finally, for me, a satisfying symposium challenges long held assumptions and complicates my own perspective on a subject by revealing new patterns and pressure points. The symposium on insurance, organized by former blog editor Kate Yoon, did just that. This series breaks open the obfuscated, intricate world of private insurance markets. For instance, did you know that municipal insurance companies are a significant barrier to fundamental police reform? Did you know that global insurance-linked securities are buoying Florida’s teetering real estate market against climate catastrophe? Did you know that most states entrust a single individual—the state insurance commissioner—with regulating the private insurance market? Among many, many other things, this symposium captures the imperfect science of underwriting and its outsized and unequal consequences, how risk is politically constructed, and what it might look like to de-risk with consumers—not insurance companies—in mind.
Sohum
In a year that has seen the continued ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian peoples of the Gaza Strip (and extensions of that project beyond the Strip), it may be the production and circulation of the 155mm shell that most clearly signals the collaboration of capitalist–imperialist enterprises with that project, as Darryl Li wrote for the blog this year, and as Shahd Hammouri situated in global shipping and logistics networks. The decision to produce such weapons remains, for now, a prerogative of management, rather than a subject over which unions and management may bargain, though Megan Wachspress proposes that workers might reasonably claim moral injury to withdraw their labor from service to the military-industrial complex. Students, meanwhile, militated against their university’s financial and political ties to the occupation of Palestine, erecting encampments, occupying buildings, and generating powerful political analyses.
The Blog has been proud to host several fora on Palestine, including a collective discussion by scholars on what international law can do for Palestinian liberation. The Palestine exception to free speech norms and academic freedom has also been at the forefront of conflict in the academy, dovetailing with the assault on race and DEI initiatives that recently saw legal inroads in the Students for Fair Admissions decision and revealing with clarity the vision that austerity-oriented university presidents developed for the future of the university, as Dave Pozen suggested.
While the unfolding genocide powerfully shaped the year and the agenda of law and political economy thinkers, it has been compounded with the problems of nationalist populism—or in Kate Redburn’s memorable formulation, Trad Dad Populism. This is the most recent variation on the historical currents of patrimonial and patriarchal capitalism that Melinda Cooper traces in her latest book, Counterrevolution, and that Allison Tait described as “making families great again.”
Beyond these intellectual ambits, I have been moved and inspired by the work that we have published on public interest lawyering. Reading Jocelyn Simonson’s recent book, Radical Acts of Justice, and the accompanying symposium has been a bright spot in a dark year; Kathryn Sabbeth’s essay on the virtues of slowing down civil processes in the service of justice and Sara Rankin’s contribution on the continued assault on the dignity of homeless people have expanded my thinking and suggested that the groundswell approach of public defense work (from housing defense to criminal defense and beyond) can be conducted with a capacious sense of both the cause of individual cases and defense work’s broader liberatory ambitions.
James
How Environmental Law Created a World Awash in Toxic Chemicals by William Boyd. There are an estimated 350,000 chemicals and chemical mixtures on the global market, of which only a handful have been properly tested. That sounds made up, right? The people in charge wouldn’t let hundreds of thousands of chemical entities loose in the environment with no real understanding of the harm they might cause, right? In this post, which draws on several of his copiously researched law review articles, William Boyd explains how our current system of risk assessment ensures that no regulation proceeds until we determine exactly how many people might suffer from a certain level of exposure, and why such assessments are often inconclusive or impossible to carry out. As a result, poorly understood, novel chemical entities are now ubiquitous in our environment, where they bioaccumulate in living organisms (like us!).
Genocide and Political Economy: Reconstructing the Relationship by Ntina Tzouvala. In a moment of rising anti-intellectualism — who will save the children from jargon!? — this post offers a case study in how academic theorizing can help make sense of our world. As Tzouvala explains, in settler colonial contexts—particularly contexts in which the settler economies do not rely on indigenous labor but require indigenous land for their spatial expansion and the development of various extractive industries—we can expect that indigenous populations will come to be viewed by dominant political groups as economically useless or obstructive. These conditions thus generate incentives for genocide and help explain why colonial violence that occurs against the backdrop of such conditions has the potential of becoming exterminationist, as happened in both America and Australia. Tzouvala goes on to explain how the definition of genocide enshrined in the Genocide Convention tends to exclude this kind of structural analysis—instead focusing narrowly on immediate physical harm—and how, despite this, South Africa’s lawyers were able to make such an analysis legible to the court in its case against Israel at the ICJ.
What is the Relationship Between Homelessness and the Law? by Chris Essert. This post draws a stunning conclusion—that the state’s creation of a system of private property imposes upon it an obligation to ensure that all of its subjects have homes of their own—from a fairly simple insight about what it means to be homeless. To be homeless is not merely to suffer from unmet needs – to be cold or hungry or exposed – but to lack a space where it’s up to you what happens. Once we appreciate this insight, however, it becomes obvious what ultimately causes homelessness: our system of property rights, which necessarily puts the homeless under the power of property owners. In other words, the creation of property rights, by affording us a space where we are in control of our lives, solves an important problem of domination, but it also gives rise to a new form of domination, by creating the condition of homelessness. For both its substance and elegance, Essert’s argument is one that would benefit any student of property (not to mention morally deficient local governments).
Between Slavery and Incarceration: An Interview with Christopher Muller by Alex Gourevitch. This short interview offers several illuminating insights about the relationship between economic exploitation, economic exclusion, and incarceration. For instance, while mass incarceration is sometimes presented as a replacement for slavery after the civil war, Muller points out that, in fact, planters in the South generally tried to keep agricultural workers out of prison—by intervening in prosecutions, punishing workers themselves, or paying workers’ fines and forcing them to work off the debt—so that they could continue to exploit their labor. This helps to resolve the puzzle of why the South had lower Black incarceration rates than the North and to explain why Black imprisonment rates were highest in counties with the highest rates of Black landownership (where Black people were more likely to be seen as competitors rather than as workers to exploit). Muller and Gourevitch also touch on the recent explosion in educational inequality in prison rates, the intellectual and political drawbacks of functionalist explanations of incarceration, and what to make of prison abolition.
Imperialism’s Shell Game by Darryl Li. In this characteristically lucid post, Li uses the political economy of 155mm artillery shells as a way to think about how U.S. imperialism actually works. The United States, he points out, is not merely the world’s leading arms exporter—we’re also the world’s leading arms trafficker. Given a global shortage of 155mm shells over the past two years, the United States has used its influence to broker a series of indirect transfers to Israel and Ukraine from countries wary of being seen as taking sides in the conflicts, including Pakistan and South Korea. What has stuck with me since first reading the post, however, is his brief observation about the role that artillery plays in providing a veneer of deniability to Israel’s allies. The apparent haphazardness of artillery, he rightly notes, more readily registers as a sign of war, albeit a lopsided one, rather than a genocide: “it is a testament to the sheer asymmetry of violence that Israel – thanks to U.S. aid – can afford to not only engage in mass slaughter before a global audience without constraint, but to do so in a piecemeal fashion that obscures the murderousness of its intent in clouds of dust.”
A few final shoutouts: Kathryn Sabbeth’s post on the efficiency of eviction court will stop you in your tracks with its presentation of facts (the average eviction case lasts less than two minutes!), as well as with its analysis of how the gains from efficiency almost exclusively accrue to landlords. Meredith Whittaker’s post on the dangers of further concentrating global surveillance and propaganda power in the hands of the United States offers a much-needed reminder that those on the left should be more concerned than they currently are about threats to free expression. As someone who was raised in and currently lives in the hinterlands, I personally appreciated Keith Orejel’s insightful account of the urban-rural political divide. If there is one post that I wish elected officials or IRS commissioners would read, it’s Luke Messac’s post about how nonprofit hospitals frequently deploy administrative hurdles to prevent low-income patients from receiving legally-mandated financial assistance. And finally, while the entire series on the LPE of Higher Ed was solid gold and ton heavy, I particularly enjoyed the exchange between Marshall Steinbaum and Ethan Ris, which illuminated both the continued stratification and remaining promise of public higher education.
