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Essay

How Terrorism Torts Could Challenge Israeli Settler Violence

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Since the early 1990s, the United States has created a scheme of laws allowing private parties to sue individuals, organizations, and foreign countries for acts of terrorism in U.S. courts. While these laws have primarily been used to target and harass Palestinians, the recent spate of violence by Israeli settlers in the West Bank presents a potential if. . .
Essay

Why Should Tenant Unions Look to Labor Law?

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With tenant organizing on the rise across the United States, legal scholars have been drawn to the idea that tenant unions, backed by the right legislative framework, could serve a function akin to labor unions. But labor and tenancy serve different functions for capitalism. Housing is a commodity that tenants consume rather than produce, so tenants would. . .
Essay

Does LPE Need Theory?

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Are we liberals or low-key Marxists? What is our theory of the “capitalism” that we so often attack? And above all, how do we understand the role of law in the making and unmaking of social order? Sam Moyn kicks off a new year at the Blog by asking whether the Law and Political Economy movement needs deeper theoretical foundations than it. . .
Announcement

That Summer Feeling

By LPE Editors

Before the Blog goes on our August hiatus, we say farewell to Angela Harris, Sanjukta Paul, Caroline Parker, and Ann Sarnak. We also welcome Veena Dubal, Aziz Rana, and Karen Tani to our editorial board, and Kate Yoon to our editorial staff. Plus, to tide you over until September, we count down the top ten most read posts of 2023.
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: July 27, 2023

By LPE Editors

Shanta Trivedi, Jane Spinak, Tina Lee, and Kelley Fong conclude our symposium on Torn Apart and Prosecuting Poverty. Plus, David Dayen on the importance of power-building for successful industrial policy and Megan Stack on how Starbucks is wantonly violating labor law.
Symposium

The Maternal Control Complex

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In carefully chronicling the history, logic, and operations of the child welfare system and Tennessee’s fetal assault law, Dorothy Roberts and Wendy Bach give us accounts not of singular systems, but of something much more wide-ranging: an almost suffocating network of authorities surrounding marginalized mothers.
Symposium

The Deep Roots Linking Help and Punishment

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Throughout America’s history, the deep-seated idea that poverty is fundamentally a moral failing on the part of the poor has shaped social welfare policies and practices. If they could run their lives properly, the logic goes, they would not be poor in the first place. Accordingly, poor and non-white folks cannot be trusted to care for their children,. . .
Symposium

The Profits of Family Policing and Punishment

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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

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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

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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

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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. . .