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Essay

The High Cost of Cheap Prisons

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Starting in the early 2000s, a bipartisan consensus emerged around the untenable price tag of mass imprisonment. Twenty years later, this left-right consensus has hardly made a dent in the US prison population. Instead, an austerity-driven approach to criminal justice reform has led to reductions in basic services inside prisons and jails, ultimately shifting. . .
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: April 7, 2023

By LPE Editors

César F. Rosado Marzán on whether wage boards can work in America, a sneak peek at the some of the most exciting forthcoming LPE and LPE-adjacent articles, and interviews with Duncan Kennedy and Jorts the Cat. Plus, the case against the new libertarian elitists, and a look at the distorting power of macroeconomic policy models.
Essay

Can Wage Boards Work in America?

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In recent years, labor activists have tried to summon one of labor’s legendary creatures — the wage board — to aid their cause. Unfortunately, reinvigorating tripartite institutions like wage boards is an uphill battle in the United States, given structural economic forces and institutional arrangements that constrain worker power. But two recent wage. . .
Announcement

What to Watch: The Thirteen Best Panels Streaming This Weekend

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Forget Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon. Over the next three days, you’ll want to turn that dial to Law and Political Economy: Labor, Social Control, and Counterpower. From the comfort of your own home, stream panels on the legal regulation of data and technology, socialist constitutionalism, decarcerating the welfare state, and so much more. Zoom links for. . .
Essay

How Free Trade Threatens Global Democracy

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As we debate matters of near-shoring, friend-shoring, and globalization, we must not forget the lessons of the recent past: from Argentina to India, the pursuit of open economies involved a brutal crack down on labor union resistance. In the process, many governments unleashed dynamics that now threaten the survival of democracy itself. Hope, though, can. . .
Essay

What CLS Meant by the Indeterminacy Thesis

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One the CLS movement’s most significant contributions was the theory of law’s inherent tendency towards indeterminacy. Yet, despite broad agreement about its importance, the thesis itself is frequently misunderstood. This confusion arises, in part, because CLS put forward two very different approaches to formulating the indeterminacy thesis. We. . .
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: March 24, 2023

By LPE Editors

Judah Schept on the carceral conjuncture in Central Appalachia, Nicholas Stump on rural resistance to fossil capital, and Christine Desan, Lev Menand, Raúl Carrillo, Rohan Grey, Dan Rohde, and Hilary Allen on the Silicon Valley Bank debacle. Plus, new articles by Sanjukta Paul and Marshall Steinbaum, more on SVB from Saule Omarova, and a hot new law and. . .
Symposium

The Carceral Conjuncture in Central Appalachia

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As a result of jail and prison expansion in Eastern Kentucky, the region has become a center of gravity in the fight over the future of the carceral state. To understand this carceral boom, we need to appreciate how multiple crises have converged in Eastern Kentucky to produce a historical moment – a conjuncture – in which prisons and jails serve as. . .
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: March 17, 2023

By LPE Editors

Darryl Li on the weaponization of terrorism torts, Emily Prifogle and Jessica Shoemaker on racial disparities in rural America, and Christopher Ali on the erasure of rural communities by the FCC. Plus, we’re asking you (yes you) to tell us about the hottest new LPE law review articles. In exchange, as always, we’ve gathered the best LPE-content from. . .
Symposium

Putting Rural Communities on the (Broadband) Map

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Broadband access in rural areas in the United States is not only a market failure, but a market disaster, as private providers have little interest in serving expensive, hard-to-reach places. In its most recent attempt to bridge the rural-urban digital divide, Congress allocated $42.5 billion for broadband deployment, the distribution of which is to be. . .

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