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Symposium

The Profits of Family Policing and Punishment

By

When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton reportedly replied, “Because that’s where the money is.” To understand our current system of family policing and punishment, we similarly need begin from the idea that this is a profit-focused system, one that extracts resources by investigating, surveilling, prosecuting, and separating low-income families.. . .
Symposium

Caring for Children by Punishing Parents

By

According to the official organs of the family policing system, their goal is to ensure that children are safe and receive proper care. But a closer look at this system demonstrates just how little concern it has for the well-being of children. Instead, its primary purpose is to punish parents – a cruelty exacerbated by the fact that we live in. . .
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: July 21, 2023

By LPE Editors

Dorothy Roberts, Wendy Bach, Amna Akbar, & Nancy Polikoff reflect on Torn Apart and Prosecuting Poverty. Plus, Noah Rosenblum on Trump’s plan for the federal bureaucracy, the FTC answers our telemarketing prayers, a special issue on Antitrust in the Age of Concentrated Power, and the JLPE seeks a copy editor.
Symposium

How Can Academic Research Support Non-Reformist Reforms?

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What is the relationship between “non-reformist reforms” and academic research? Scholars can, of course, write about the legislation and policy that they believe will advance transformative change. Yet the way a group seeks reform – how a group organizes and fights for political change – is as important, if not more, than the substance of. . .
Symposium

Under the Guise of Care

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The carceral state is in a deep legitimacy crisis, with questions about its proper function up for public debate, and social movements pushing for care, public safety, and accountability. Municipalities, meanwhile, are experimenting with non-police responses to varied social problems. These efforts are important: they signal that abolitionist organizing and. . .
Symposium

Building a World Without Criminalized Care

By

In 2013, a group of Tennessee legislators made it a crime for a pregnant woman to transmit narcotics to a fetus. The law’s supporters offered many of the traditional justifications for criminal law, but they also leaned heavily on a less familiar argument: that creating this crime would, in effect, create care. Indeed, they argued that criminalizing this. . .
Symposium

Building a World Without Family Policing

By

Far from promoting the well-being of children, the so-called child welfare system weaponizes children as a way to threaten families, to scapegoat parents for societal harms to their children, and to buttress the racist, patriarchal, and capitalist status quo. Torn Apart tears off the benevolent veneer of family policing to reveal its political reality. . .
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: July 14, 2023

By LPE Editors

Seven heavy hitters on student debt cancellation, Brian Highsmith on the plight of local governance in Jackson, Mississippi, and Samuel Bagg on two fallacies of democratic design. Plus, LPE happy hour in NYC, two new gigs at the Harvard LPE Program, conferences on Climate Change and American Political Economy, Katrina Forrester’s Quentin Skinner Lecture,. . .
Essay

Two Fallacies of Democratic Design

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LPE scholars and fellow travelers often call for a more democratic organization of power in our society. However, in specifying what this entails at the level of institutions, proposals commonly rely on two widespread but mistaken assumptions – the idea that more participation is necessarily more democratic, and the idea that democratizing decision-making within. . .
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: July 7, 2023

By LPE Editors

Sameer Ashar on prefigurative lawyering, Chase Foster and Kathleen Thelen on Brandeis in Brussels, and Hendro Sangkoyo on resource raiding in Indonesia. Plus, the first-ever DC LPE happy hour, a call to join the progressive talent pipeline, a new piece by Amna Akbar on non-reformist reforms, and Jonathan Levy’s reflections on Adam Smith in Hyde Park.. . .
Essay

Toward Prefigurative Lawyering

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Our current moment, filled with peril for all but those with extreme wealth, is one that calls for radical experimentation with utopian institutional and social forms – what are sometimes referred to as “prefigurative” projects. Yet legal education and dominant legal practices tend to constrain the imaginative capacities necessary for. . .

LPE Masthead

Managing Editor James Brandt Editoral Board Amna Akbar Corinne Blalock Veena Dubal Luke Herrine Amy Kapczynski Caroline Parker Aziz Rana Kate Redburn Karen Tani Noah Zatz Student Editors Liz Brown Chloe Miller Sohum Pal Elliot Setzer 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 Andrew Miller Roxana Moussavian Lydia Nicholson