Gerontocracy in America has elicited a common refrain from critics: that class, not age, is the real problem. Yet this kind of class reductionism has largely been rejected when it comes to gender and race, and age should be no exception. To understand oligarchic power on a mass scale in America, we must attend to the extensive network of formal and structural advantages that age-based policies confer on tens of millions of people.

What is LPE? Is it a reaction to law and economics? Does it have a method? What is its normative north star? At this year’s ALPE conference, Amy Kapczynski, Corinne Blalock, Aslı Bâli, Sabeel Rahman, Angela Harris, and Yochai Benkler offered their best answers to these questions in two sentences or less.

When defending income inequality, high-earners often appeal to an old left-wing idea: that workers are entitled to the fruits of their labor and should be paid the value of their productive contribution. In complex economies, however, the size of any worker’s productive contribution depends on collective labor that the market systematically fails to credit.

The United States’ turn toward naked coercion and transactional deal-making represents both a genuine departure from its commitment to the liberal international legal order and the culmination of that order’s internal contradictions.

Amna Akbar interviews Joe Soss and Joshua Page about how the criminal legal system extracts resources from the nation’s most oppressed communities and converts them into public and private revenues.

Coined by a German economist in 1926, Fordism came to describe the dominant political-economic order of the mid-twentieth century. Could “Muskism” play a similar role in the twenty-first? How should we understand its distinctive regime of accumulation, and what kind of social contract does it propose?