Skip to content

LPE Blog

American Kafala
American Kafala

American Kafala

By

Under the kafala system, tens of millions of migrant workers across the Levant and Gulf have their legal residency tied to a single employer, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation and state control. In the United States, the Trump administration’s attacks on both undocumented and legally present migrants threaten to consolidate a similar regime of labor extraction and migrant precarity.

Continue Reading
Featured

What Do You Mean by Efficiency? An Opinionated Guide

By

To ask “but what do you mean by efficiency?” can make one appear unsophisticated or pedantic. But that’s precisely the question we should be asking. Because there are good reasons to reject the notions of “efficiency” usually taught in 1L classes, even if — in fact, precisely because — we have good reason to value other forms of efficiency.

Where is the Political Economy?

By , ,

Embracing the terms “economy” and “political economy,” as LPE has done, risks invoking just the kind of separate, reified realm that we are trying to critique. In our view, defining “the economy,” and studying how legal institutions have done so, should be central issues that LPE scholarship aims to address.

Law & Neoliberalism

By ,
Neoliberalism is an indispensable term for making sense of the legal, political, and ideological conflicts of the moment, and also one of the most maligned. Liberals who feel criticized by it have insisted so often and so loudly on its uselessness that even those on the left who use it often seem compelled to apologize…
Recent
Announcement

Off with the Lotus Eaters

By

Before the Blog goes on its annual August hiatus, we count down the ten most read posts of 2026 so far, say a fond farewell to our departing student editors, and welcome three new additions to the team.
Interview

What Rolls Downhill

By

Recent calls for mandatory retirement in academia are a reminder that class and other social hierarchies are something like mountains with increasingly dense fog toward their peaks: the higher up one is, the less one understands that upon which and above which one stands.
Essay

Cradle to the Grave

By

As Sam Moyn has recently argued, “class reductionism” fails to explain differentiation along the generational gradient — a pattern clearly visible in economics, politics, and ideology. Yet a clear picture of how age mediates class would reveal not gerontocracy, but capitalism and the fractionated class system it produces.
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: July 24

By

Madison Condon and Luke Herrine on the economics that Law & Economics ignores, Jeremy Bearer-Friend and Sarah Polcz on why we should tax AI equity, Matt Bodie on the persistence of shareholder primacy, and Diana Reddy on theorizing discrimination for the bad jobs economy. Plus, two PhD scholarships available at UNSW Law, a set of new papers from the. . .
Symposium

Twilight of the Gods

By

Contemporary proponents of law and economics claim to have abandoned the idea that law is an instrument for maximizing economic efficiency and wealth. Corporate law scholars haven’t yet heard the good news.

LPE Masthead

Managing Editor James Brandt Editoral Board Zohra Ahmed Corinne Blalock Veena Dubal Luke Herrine Amy Kapczynski Aziz Rana Kate Redburn Ntina Tzouvala Lisa Washington Noah Zatz Student Editors Liz Brown Edie Conekin-Tooze Eve Zelickson
Student Editor Emeriti Sam Aber Ashraf Ahmed Will Bloom Adam H. Bradlow Matthew Buck Brett Davidson Isabel Echarte Tariq El-Gabalawy Berto Elysee Molly Gordon Jeff Gordon Ruthie Lazenby Talya Lockman-Fine Chloe Miller Andrew Miller Roxana Moussavian Lydia Nicholson Ure Obioma