Dear Readers,
When Amy Kapczynski introduces law and political economy, she often begins by describing a paradigmatic law student who arrives ready to fight injustice and is quickly sucked into an alienating vortex of efficiency-seeking and cost-benefit analyses. I was that student when I started law school, and by chance stumbled into the nascent LPE world as a 2L. My peers had already begun to work with Amy to put together a seminar on Law and Political Economy, which completely transformed my sense of how legal change might intellectually – and we hope, practically – deconstruct neoliberalism, while taking concrete steps toward a more just future.
It has been my pleasure to lead the LPE Blog through its first several years, together with Amy, Jedediah Britton-Purdy, David Grewal, Sabeel Rahman, and three generations of student editors. We set out with twin goals of developing an approach to legal thinking we could call LPE, and creating pedagogical tools to make LPE accessible to law students. Our incredible group of contributors have far exceeded expectations, rising to the challenge of putting complicated, new thinking into short essays, and gamely trying to work out how bring LPE analyses into 1L courses.
I don’t need to remind readers that the challenges in this moment are immense. The daily stream of horrors would be difficult enough to metabolize without the backdrop of brutal antagonism and calculated neglect. My hope is that participating in the blog offers at least some small bright space for readers and authors alike. It’s meant to be a place where people from different disciplines, with different methods, concepts, and relationships to legal practice, policy, and social movements can try to hash things out, asking each other hard questions about where to find racial capitalism’s weak points, what do think about the courts, and how domestic labor can confront global capital.
On a more personal note, the blog has anchored me through the (expected) vicissitudes and itineracy of JD-PhD study, and an (unexpected) major medical crisis. It’s been such a gift to build community with law faculty and students around the country, and our LPE Project team based at Yale. I’m (finally!) graduating from law school, and so now seems like the right time to hand over the day-to-day operations of the blog to the excellent Luke Herrine. When you email managingeditor@lpeblog.org, you’ll now reach him. But you won’t be able to get rid of me – I’ll be moving into a new role as part of the blog’s Editorial Board, and will stay connected to the range of LPE activities we’re all cooking up.
Thank you,
Kate
