The Two Faces of American Freedom, Ten Years Later: Part One
In celebration of the tenth anniversary of its publication, Henry Brooks interviews Aziz Rana on his influential book and what it might teach us about the legacies of populism.
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Weekly Roundup: December 4, 2020
At the Blog We finished up our series on the law and political economy of animal agriculture with Lee Miller’s essay on the connections between climate justice and justice for animals. Since we didn’t have a roundup last week you may have missed Caroline Parker’s introduction to the series, Viveca Morris’s case for breaking up…. . .
Environmental Justice is Climate Justice is Justice for Animals
One of the great dangers of our national climate policy vacuum is that the fox will happily take charge of the henhouse. In North Carolina, a partnership between Big Pig and Big Energy foreshadows a troubling realignment of the forces of oligarchy…
Privatized “Affordable Housing” Is A Scam
You hear it everywhere: we need more “affordable housing.” It’s a seemingly uncontroversial call, and yet… a group of members of the LA Tenants Union were compelled to document the many and profound problems with the dominant model of privatized “affordable housing” in the United States.
Overrating Under-determination; Underrating Capitalism (A Reply to Karl Klare)
Klare speaks to the virtues of post- and non-marxist social theory. My impression is that these literatures are long on the kind of disaggregation that the theory of underdetermination permits. Marxist critical theory tends to place more emphasis on aggregating, finding patterns. That kind of thought and past socialists who held to only minimally appear in. . .
We treat animals as legal objects. We should treat them as legal subjects instead.
The law treats animals as objects with no legally-recognized rights or interests. Changing the basic legal status of animals will make positive change easier to achieve.
At the Cost of an Animal
Animal agriculture relies on cultural myths about farming. The animal rights movement seeks to build countervailing narratives that center the ugly reality. The result is an ongoing legal battle about speech, truth, and visibility.
Break Up the Modern Meat Trust
Big Meat’s rise to power is not the result of entrepreneurial savvy exercised in a free market. Multinational meat conglomerates have flourished because they are massively subsidized at the public’s expense.
The LPE of Meat: A Symposium on Food & Agriculture
While leftists begin to coalesce in opposition to industrial meat production, the imagined left alternative remains ill-defined. The goal of this symposium is to crack open these conversations on the blog.
LPE Originals
Weekly Roundup: November 20, 2020
At the Blog Madison Gray (3L at Penn Law and part of the LPE student network!) published two posts on organized houseless folks winning a big victory in Philadelphia by refusing to budge from encampments they set up to support each other. Her first post recounts the struggle, drawing from the words of organizers themselves.…
Not an “Achievement Gap”, a Racial Capitalist Chasm
Throughout this pandemic, transnational corporations and white parents alike have been sounding the “achievement gap” alarm under the guise of concern for “voiceless” Black and Brown children, but in service of their own neoliberal agendas. The students they speak of, however, can speak for themselves — and as they struggle through this time, with. . .
How the Philly #HousingNow Encampment Movement Prompts Us to Reimagine a Right to Contract, Part 2
In today’s post I explore how the success of those encampments presents a vision of contracting that counters the traditional Lochner-esque “freedom of contract” through the occupation and democratization of the right to contract which, under a commodified housing system, ultimately enlivens the right to housing.
How the Philly #HousingNow Encampment Movement Prompts Us to Reimagine a Right to Contract, Part 1
This summer, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the corresponding racial justice uprising, a coalition of unhoused people and organizers with the Black and Brown Workers Cooperative and the Workers Revolutionary Collective quietly hitched some tents in a park just off the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in downtown Philadelphia.
LPE Originals
Weekly Roundup: November 13, 2020
We’re back from election week!
What Makes An Administrative Agency “Democratic”?
Scholarship thus far has not reconciled the relationship between democratized agency policymaking and the regular lawmaking done by Congress. To ameliorate the inexorable agency costs, theorists generally pose two different solutions: (1) a democratization of agency discretion, e.g., by making notice and comment procedures more robust; or (2) forcing Congress. . .
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