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Symposium

Facing the Limits

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In Free Gifts, Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism’s persistent failure to value the natural world. Yet the lesson of this exploration is much broader: that capitalism imposes fundamental limits on our collective freedom.
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: Dec 5

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Madison Condon on climate change and externalities-thinking, Colleen Carrol on MAGA’s attempt to outflank democrats on college affordability, and Alvin Velazquez and Christopher Hampson on what LPE and the Bible have in common. Plus, Zephyr Teachout on the rise of MLMs, Susannah Glickman and Nic Johnson on the political economy of Trump’s second. . .
Essay

The Dark Doppelganger of Affordable Higher Education

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In the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, the Trump administration included a brilliant bit of faux-populism: a five-year tuition freeze. The proposal creates the illusion that the right is taking decisive action to address affordability, while obfuscating its larger plan to abandon higher education as a public good. To prevent MAGA from. . .
Symposium

Is Climate Change an Externality?

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Environmental harms are often cast as externalities, even by those seeking to emphasize their urgency. Yet the major modern environmental statutes, written before America’s neoliberal turn toward Coasean thinking, expressly rejected the use of economic analysis in designing pollution regulation. What does this history teach us, and how might our. . .
Symposium

What Can Politics Make of Nature?

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Alyssa Battistoni’s Free Gifts argues that capitalism limits our freedom to decide how to value the nonhuman world. Politics, as the domain in which we choose the terms of our collective life, has a special role to play in moving beyond these limitations. But what is Battistoni’s conception of politics, and how big is the effective space that. . .
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: Nov 21

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Alyssa Battistoni on the free gifts of nature, Rob Hunter on value form theory and the accelerating climate crisis, and Reshard L. Kolabhai on what LPE can learn from the Global South. Plus, a CFP on Lawyering Without the Law, Advait Arun on the capital structure of the AI sector, Sabeel Rahman on the case for a third reconstruction, Brett Christophers on. . .
Essay

LPE Without Borders: Lessons from the Global South

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Law and political economy scholarship, immersed in a particular history of Northern law and capitalism, has tended to focus on US law and policy, with occasional excursions into Europe. But in a world where imperialist ideas and technologies tend to circle back to the metropole, and where the periphery appears to be the future of the center, the Global South. . .
Symposium

In the Shadow of Commodification

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While capitalism is typically said to commodify everything, much of what makes up our world isn’t commodified at all. It instead appears as a free gift: a social form that describes the condition of usefulness lacking value. The idea of the free gift can give us a deeper understanding of the environmental problems that plague contemporary capitalism. It. . .
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: Nov 14

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Vanessa Williamson on oligarchy and taxation, and Elle Rothermich on the commodification of hospice care. Plus, Kate Redburn on Skrmetti, LPE Night School on municipal power, Claire Kelloway on public grocery projects, Cassie Powell on private equity’s move into mobile home parks, Jacob Udell and Routhy Gourevitch on the multifamily rental. . .
Essay

Hospice Commodification and the Limits of Antitrust

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As hospice care is increasingly dominated by private equity firms, an antitrust response, while necessary, has the potential to normalize the language of the market as the default mode for discussing healthcare reform. Hospice demonstrates what is lost when healthcare is described as a mere economic exchange, and Medicare’s per diem hospice benefit harbors. . .
Essay

The Long Anti-Tax Tradition of American Oligarchy

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Throughout U.S. history, oligarchs have fettered the tax power of the state to ensure that the government would be too feeble to rein in their power. The Trump Administration’s capricious tariffs and mass firings at the Internal Revenue Service are the latest iteration of this long, anti-tax, anti-democratic tradition.
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: Nov 7

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Matthew Dimick on antitrust and the logic of capitalism, and G.S. Hans on legal clinics under political attack. Plus, a cool new fellowship at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, Cea Weaver on the housing politics in New York City, the Debt Collective on the threat that municipal debt poses to Mamdani, Sam Moyn on making congress great again, Sandeep Dhaliwal. . .

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