With the spring submission season nearly in the books, and our Twitter feeds abuzz with placement announcements, we thought we would highlight some of the most exciting forthcoming LPE and LPE-adjacent articles. There is, of course, more excellent work being done by the LPE community than any editorial staff could possibly track, so please think of what follows as a mere appetizer for the feast that awaits you over the coming year.
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Zohra Ahmed, “The Price of Consent,” forthcoming in the Yale Journal of International Law. This article exposes how inequalities in the international economy and in international financial institutions facilitate the U.S.-led Global War on Terror. Using U.S.-Pakistan relations as a case study, it shows how the U.S. has deployed its powerful position at the International Monetary Fund to secure Pakistan’s consent for its military activities. (Related blog post: “Towards a Law and Political Economy Approach to the Global War on Terror.”)
Prithika Balakrishnan, “Mass Surveillance as Racialized Control,” forthcoming in the UCLA Law Review. Recent attempts to address pretrial mass incarceration through bail reform and COVID-19 compassionate release have embraced digital surveillance, resulting in unintended and little understood consequences. This article examines how the expanded use of pretrial GPS surveillance is radically changing the presumption of innocence and amplifying racial disparities in our criminal justice system.
Elettra Bietti, “Structuring Digital Platform Markets: Antitrust and Utilities’ Convergence,” forthcoming in the Illinois Law Review. Focusing on the case of Google and its regulation between 1998 and 2022, this article argues for the dynamic structuring of digital platform markets through various methods pooled from antitrust and other regulatory regimes.
Hannah Bloch-Wehba, “The Promise and Perils of Tech Whistleblowing,” forthcoming in the Northwestern University Law Review. This article offers an account of the rise and influence of tech whistleblowing and makes the case that broader protections for whistleblowing are a necessary component of systemic regulation of the tech sector.
Sandeep Dhaliwal, “Investing in Abolition,” forthcoming in the Georgetown Law Review. This article describes how a network of private equity firms rapidly expanded the footprint and capacities of the now predominant prison telecom company Securus, and explains the legal and political foundations that condition the carceral services market’s very possibility.
Veena Dubal, “On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination,” forthcoming in the Columbia Law Review. This article examines the historical rupture in wage calculation, coordination, and distribution arising from the use of granular data to produce unpredictable, variable, and personalized hourly pay. (Related blog post: “The House Always Wins: The Algorithmic Gamblification of Work.”)
Blake Emerson, “Vindicating Public Rights,” forthcoming in the Penn Journal of Constitutional Law. This article argues that, understood as the law of public liberty, administrative law is not about the restraint of governmental power in favor of vested economic interests. Rather, administrative law affirmatively protects public rights–entitlements held by the body politic that are grounded in the requirements of republican self-government.
Pamela Foohey and Christopher K. Odinet, “Silencing Litigation Through Bankruptcy,” forthcoming in the Virginia Law Review. This article examines how defendants harness bankruptcy’s reorganization process to deprive survivors of their voice and the public of the truth.
Jake Goldenfein and Lee McGuigan, “Managed Sovereigns: How Inconsistent Accounts of the Human Rationalize Platform Advertising,” forthcoming in the Journal of Law and Political Economy. This article argues that platform advertising is sustained by a process where seemingly incompatible conceptions of human subjects are codified and enacted in law and industrial art.
Rachel Griffin, “Rethinking Rights in Social Media Governance: Human Rights, Ideology and Inequality,” forthcoming in European Law Open. This article offers an analysis of the role of human rights in EU social media regulation from a critical/LPE perspective, arguing that the dominant tendency to frame policy problems and solutions in human rights terms has an individualistic bias that ultimately legitimises corporate power and sidelines critiques of the political economy of the industry.
Shawn Fields, “The Procedural Justice Industrial Complex,” forthcoming in the Indiana Law Journal. This article provides the first comprehensive account of the procedural justice industrial complex, charting its roots in community policing and its evolution into a cottage industry of private, for-profit purveyors offering costly procedural justice trainings to departments flush with federal grant money.
Jacob Hamburger, “Hybrid-Status Immigrant Workers,” forthcoming in the Duke Law Journal. This article examines the immigration implications of state bills like California’s AB5 that seek to protect workers from misclassification as independent contractors. It argues that although Federal immigration law requires employers to verify that all employees are permitted to work in the United States, such bills need not automatically trigger harmful immigration consequences.
Nicholas Handler, “Separation of Powers by Contract: How Collective Bargaining Reshapes Presidential Power,” forthcoming in the NYU Law Review. This article discusses how unionized federal civil servants use contract and collective bargaining to reshape presidential power. It explores the different ways in which collective bargaining agreements can, for example, prevent structural deregulation through attacks on agency effectiveness and expand or restrict the range of discretion civil servants can exercise when enforcing federal law.
Jonathan Harris, “Consumer Law as Work Law,” forthcoming in the California Law Review. This article calls for an integrated work law, which includes consumer law, to more adequately counter firms’ exploitation of workers. (Related Blog Post: “Can Consumer Law Protect Workers?”)
Kate Jackson, “The Public Trust: Administrative Legitimacy and Democratic Lawmaking,” forthcoming in the Connecticut Law Review. This article argues that recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions invalidating agency policymaking based upon the major questions doctrine rely on a normatively and empirically mistaken notion of democratic popular sovereignty. (Related Blog Post: “What Makes an Administrative Agency Democratic?”)
Rachel E. López, “Participatory Law Scholarship,” forthcoming in Columbia Law Review. Drawing from the experience of co-authoring scholarship with two activists who were sentenced to life without parole over three decades ago, this article outlines the theory and practice of “participatory law scholarship.”
Saule Omarova and Graham Steele, “Banking and Antitrust,” forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal. This article breaks down the separation between banking and antitrust and demonstrates how banking law can be understood as a particular kind of sector-specific antitrust regime, rooted in the same antimonopoly tradition in American law and policy.
K-Sue Park, “Property and Sovereignty in America: A History of Title Registries & Jurisdictional Power,” forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal. This article depicts colonial uses of the American title registry as a tool for county creation and ultimately conquest, and argues that Anglo-American colonists used the concept of the title registry as a tool for expanding jurisdictional claims over Native lands.
Shiri Pasternak and Irina Cerić, “‘The Legal Billy Club’: First Nations, Injunctions, and the Public Interest,” forthcoming in the Toronto Metropolitan University Law Review. This article shows how the Canadian common law test for injunctions produces imbalanced outcomes in conflicts involving natural resources and Indigenous rights, and argues that this disparity results from a narrow view of the public interest, which prioritizes the economic interests of natural resource corporations and largely disregards the importance of Aboriginal rights.
Gali Racabi, “Balancing is for Suckers,” forthcoming in the Cornell Law Review. This article details how courts have smuggled a balancing test approach into labor law where none exists in the original statute, to the detriment of workers’ rights.
Dan Rohde, “The Bank of the People, 1835-1840: Law and Money in Upper Canada,” forthcoming in the Osgoode Hall Law Journal. This article connects the 1830s contest over Canadian money & sovereignty to present-day debates in the wake of financial crises.
Wyatt Sassman, “The Legal Foundations of Extractive Power,” forthcoming in the UCLA Law Review. This article describes how legal frameworks align to grant industry power over communities targeted for extraction and applies this understanding to explain why prominent oil & gas law reforms adopted in Colorado have failed (Related Blog Post: “Communities of Extraction”)
Jessica Shoemaker, “Re-placing Property,” forthcoming in the University of Chicago Law Review. Weaving together both rural and urban case studies, this article analyzes the complex relationship between property and placemaking. (Related Blog Post: “Rural and Racialized: How Property Law Perpetuates Racial Disparities“)
Ganesh Sitaraman, “Deplatforming,” forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal. This article recovers the historical foundation of the law of deplatforming in various Networks, Platforms, and Utilities, and considers ways in which past deplatforming practices can inform current debates over the public and private governance of tech platforms. (Related Blog Post: “Networks, Platforms, and Utilities: Law and Policy”)
Ganesh Sitaraman & Morgan Ricks, “Tech Platforms and the Law of Common Carriers,” forthcoming in the Duke Law Journal. This article argues that tech platforms are and should be subject to common law actions for violating the duties of common carriers.
Rick Weinmeyer, “Lavatories of Democracy: Recognizing a Right to Public Toilets through International Human Rights and State Constitutional Law,” forthcoming in the Penn Journal of Constitutional Law. This article proposes recognizing state constitutional rights to public bathrooms as a comprehensive first step towards addressing the United States’ public bathroom crisis. (Related blog post: “The Public Reliance on Private Toilets”)
Joanna Wuest and Briana Last, “Church Against State: How Industry Groups Lead the Religious Liberty Assault on Civil Rights, Healthcare Policy, and the Administrative State,” forthcoming in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics. This article reveals how industry-funded religious liberty litigation groups like the Becket Fund and the Alliance Defending Freedom have sought to undermine healthcare policy and law while simultaneously attacking the rights of sexual and gender minorities.” (Related Blog Post: “State, Economy, and LGBTQ+ Civil Rights”)
Yiran Zhang, “The Care Bureaucracy,” forthcoming in the Indiana Law Journal. Through the concept of the “care bureaucracy,” this article describes the ongoing bureaucratization of public home care, analyzes its political economy context, including its origin in poverty law, and lays out its benefits and profound costs.
