Elite white capital created housing for middle-class whites built by working-class whites. Nowhere in this process, nor in the profit of lending, the employment of housing construction, or the long-term appreciation of white homeownership, was there a meaningful place for African Americans to bridge racial economic inequality.
Two entrenched features of cost-benefit analysis ensure that the benefits of regulatory measures addressing climate change and racial injustice will be diminished and deformed in the process of valuing them: discounting and monetary valuation.
Introducing an LPE symposium on the promise, the perils, and the possible future of cost-benefit analysis.
A possible silver lining in the TransUnion decision, the role of early corporations in economic thought, and the continued racism of municipal bond ratings.
Every year, governments and public entities wrestle with tough decisions about how they will fund their communities, and every year we absolve Wall Street of its role in siphoning money away from our public budgets. Enough is enough.
History shows that the standards by which societies judge economic activity change over time. As these moral frameworks evolve—or devolve—many of the changes make their way into law. For example, modern anti-trust law is grounded in the widely accepted belief that monopolies depress competition and growth and encourage unscrupulous behavior. However, in. . .
The logic of the Court’s recent TransUnion decision should make it harder, perhaps impossible, for corporations to enforce various forms of so-called “intellectual property” against competitors and the public. Could and should the legal left wield TransUnion for our own purposes?
Allocating resilience, a new vision of corporate law, and how to turn public debt into a public good.
Dependence on public debt is a hallmark of democratic capitalist governance. How, then, can we ensure that the interests of private investors do not overtake the needs of the people that debt is meant to serve?
Replacing the liberal subject with the vulnerable one, and the responsive state with the restrained one, exposes the ways in which current corporate jurisprudence is blind to the allocation of resilience in society. Introducing vulnerability theory to corporate law may therefore help to ensure that all stakeholders have equal access to the corporation’s resources. . .
The laws that apply to market activities have long catered to the interests of seasoned market actors. Who, then, is to watch out for us lay market users?
Introducing vulnerability theory, Martha McCluskey on the mythical ideal of the autonomous subject, and Brian Highsmith on the curse of fiscal federalism.
American cities’ reliance on municipal debt must be understood as part of a larger structural reliance on concentrated, mobile capital.
Given the human condition of inevitable uncertainty and fragility, societal prosperity depends on supporting diversely situated knowledge and inclusive power—not on maximizing rewards for a few seemingly superior winners.
The LPE Blog introduces a particularly effective way to begin ridding the law of neoliberalism: the vulnerability theory.