Next week, the Association of Law and Political Economy will elect its first Board of Directors—another step on the road to becoming a democratically constituted, self-sustaining organization. Candidate statements will be released later this week, and balloting will run from June 19 through June 26. Statements will only be circulated to membership, so make sure to become a member by Friday if you want to vote in the election!
To mark this milestone, the Blog is bringing you some special, on-the-ground coverage from the inaugural ALPE conference. On Monday, we visited a plenary session on the past, present, and future of LPE; today, our intrepid reporter in the field, James Bhandary-Alexander, offers some sights and sounds from the convention floor.
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This past February, more than 500 people gathered in Richmond, Virginia, to attend the inaugural conference of the Association of Law and Political Economy, also known as ALPE. This new academic association features plenty of intellectual, political, and social fault lines. But over the course of the weekend’s plenaries, workshops, organizing sessions, happy hours, and breakouts, a new association of the academic left discussed and debated how to cohere their existing porous unity – organized around a shared rejection of neoliberal capitalism – into a robust formation that could serve to advance a shared scholarly and political agenda.
But could leftist scholars succeed in organizing a conference? From the outset, they faced two significant challenges. The first will be familiar to anyone reading this Blog: over the past few years, and especially under the second Trump administration, the right has brought all the culture war pain and state repression it could deliver on colleges and universities. As JD Vance, quoting Richard Nixon, declared in 2021, “professors are the enemy.” A number of people had trouble obtaining funds to attend the conference due to academic and state rules misidentifying and simultaneously repressing so-called “DEI” and “CRT” initiatives. One junior scholar from a red-state public university put it simply: “I’m cautious about identifying as LPE.” Some people who attended the conference—including private practitioners, government employees, students, and university faculty—did not want to talk on the record.
Another challenge concerned the inherent tension between a scholarly disposition and effective organization. As a young law student in the early 2000s, I recall attending the now-defunct Socialist Scholars Conference in New York City. While the conference included electrifying speeches by Cornel West, Bill Fletcher, Jr., Barbara Eherenreich, and Tariq Ali, it also included scenes ripped straight from the pages of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, published by the pre-CIA Office of Special Services and designed to facilitate sabotage in Axis-Occupied Europe. In the section on how to disrupt organizations and conferences, the manual’s authors, including possibly my grandfather – a German Jewish refugee, OSS staffer, and aspiring academic himself – advised saboteurs to “talk as frequently as possible and at great length,” “refer all matters to committees,” “haggle over precise wordings,” and “be worried about the propriety of any decision.” These are, of course, all things that scholars are supposed to do. If basic professional functions also happen to be established methods of disorganization and sabotage, what hope does ALPE have? These first days of association, as much as anything, would be a credibility test for the fledgling organization, as many would agree with the stoic proclamation of one untenured attendee: “I don’t want to be part of something that won’t amount to anything.”
What is that something? One key set of questions raised at the conference revolved around LPE’s common project, methodologies, and boundaries. As one conference organizer commented, “most people in LPE are willing to admit that capitalism is the problem, but some people think it can be fixed, and others don’t.” Another told me that “LPE’s purchase is that it allows critiques of capitalism that do not cut off discussion of race, sex, gender, and ability off at the knees.” In plenaries, panels, and organizing workshops, participants discussed a wide range of scholarly interests—including the environment, antitrust, labor, gender, international law, race, and criminal justice—making efforts to reveal the role of law in structuring the trajectory of the economy and its relationship to the state.
While this core critique might be enough to bring people together for the weekend, at least one plenary participant observed that “as long as we don’t have broadly shared methods and frameworks that could reshape the way the legal profession sees its own work and products, it is unlikely to have a sustained impact on legal transformation like, for example, that of the Federalist Society.” Many on the panel disagreed, albeit politely, arguing for a more pluralistic future for ALPE. For at least one student in the audience, there was “too much ‘kumbayaing’ on the stage, and an anxiety around the fact that there are deep theoretical differences between people in this community.”
Some of these theoretical differences reflected differences in professional training. While most conference goers had a legal background, there were also attendees trained in sociology, economics, medicine, forestry, and history. To many, this interdisciplinarity, if nurtured, could prove to be a major strength of ALPE. But being around so many lawyers and legal academics was, for other participants, “interesting.” One social scientist shared that “if you think of the law as a social phenomenon the way race is, then people working through the weeds of law sound, in some ways, like phrenologists, like race scientists.”
For many law students at conference, however, LPE represented a way to avoid sounding like that. One student, who “had been told that law school was intellectually vacant and bereft of meaning,” was grateful to find LPE. As these students face the double vice of mind-numbing doctrinal classes and big-firm-pimping career services offices, LPE has provided an intellectual community and sustained their values.
Junior scholars were well represented at the conference, and ALPE is developing structures to move faculty through the academy. One of these career development panels was so oversubscribed that, according to reports, only people immediately going on the market were allowed to participate. Junior scholars who spoke to me tended to agree that the academic job market is very difficult, indeed. As one young labor scholar told me, “I am on a one-year contract, but I feel even getting that is like I grabbed the last seat on a life raft.” This reminded me of something I had heard earlier that day from the stage: “Everyone in this room is a worker.” I noticed, however, that at the really interesting AAUP organizing breakout session, tenured faculty were the majority.
Another junior scholar pointed out to me that racial diversity at the conference was “concentrated among people on the job market, not the employed.” Just before the conference, the Washington Post reported its analysis of academic faculty diversity, finding significant, if modest gains, for underrepresented faculty between 2015 and 2024. However, many of these gains are likely to be wiped out by governmental threats to diversity programs, research funding, and specific programs or fields that utilize any kind of race analysis. Some attendees articulated a fear that LPE might be prone to jettison talk of race, gender, ability and the world outside the United States—that it was, in the words of one scholar, at risk of adopting “the myopia of the Bernie campaign.” This echoed the injunction I heard from several people at the Race and LPE organizing session “not to repeat what happened to CLS,” a familiar warning with many meanings. Many participants in the session publicly committed to turning LPE into a space that not only incorporated racial analysis, but becomes the premiere space in the academy to do so.
As for the here and now, one person told me that she gave the conference a passing “B” on intersectionality but “without honors.” Turning her attention to another hierarchy, she observed that “it became apparent that there are the top five law school folks and then there’s the rest of us… As a community, we need to think hard about who we have stepping forward and who we have stepping back.”
For many I spoke with at the conference, the resolution to these concerns will come through socializing, conversation, and collective debate within democratic structures. As one organizer put it, “we’re at the moment where we’ve had a baby, and we’re deciding how to raise it.” This baby, ALPE, will, literally, be raised by committee, and an elected one. In closing remarks, conference organizers urged participants to take on leadership in the organization.
Most people I spoke with had signed up to be ALPE members, and everyone agreed that a self-funded organization was needed, free from the whims of foundations and wealthy philanthropists. One junior labor scholar compared it to unions he had worked with, who, through a dues structure, at least had a shot of avoiding capture by money. I asked him: “do you think capital will, at the end of the day, disapprove of ALPE?” He paused for a moment and answered: “I mean…I certainly hope so.”
Often enough, the boss is the best organizer, and that may prove to be the case here. The quiet capitulation of so many universities to Trump has failed the public, the ill effects of corporate control of education on the public good are clear, and people across the world anticipate a world beyond neoliberalism and United States hegemony. Against this backdrop, thanks to the efforts of many committed conference organizers, and despite our professional tendency towards self-sabotage, the weekend proved that leftist scholars can organize a conference, and even lay the groundwork for a durable organization.
