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Symposium

Building a World Without Family Policing

By

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. . .
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: July 14, 2023

By LPE Editors

Seven heavy hitters on student debt cancellation, Brian Highsmith on the plight of local governance in Jackson, Mississippi, and Samuel Bagg on two fallacies of democratic design. Plus, LPE happy hour in NYC, two new gigs at the Harvard LPE Program, conferences on Climate Change and American Political Economy, Katrina Forrester’s Quentin Skinner Lecture,. . .
Essay

Two Fallacies of Democratic Design

By

LPE scholars and fellow travelers often call for a more democratic organization of power in our society. However, in specifying what this entails at the level of institutions, proposals commonly rely on two widespread but mistaken assumptions – the idea that more participation is necessarily more democratic, and the idea that democratizing decision-making within. . .
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: July 7, 2023

By LPE Editors

Sameer Ashar on prefigurative lawyering, Chase Foster and Kathleen Thelen on Brandeis in Brussels, and Hendro Sangkoyo on resource raiding in Indonesia. Plus, the first-ever DC LPE happy hour, a call to join the progressive talent pipeline, a new piece by Amna Akbar on non-reformist reforms, and Jonathan Levy’s reflections on Adam Smith in Hyde Park.. . .
Essay

Toward Prefigurative Lawyering

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Our current moment, filled with peril for all but those with extreme wealth, is one that calls for radical experimentation with utopian institutional and social forms – what are sometimes referred to as “prefigurative” projects. Yet legal education and dominant legal practices tend to constrain the imaginative capacities necessary for. . .
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: June 30, 2023

By LPE Editors

Ntina Tzouvala on the ongoing Afghan central bank saga, Eva Nanopoulos on the contradictions of “peaceful” sanctions, and Aslı Bâli on the parasitic relationship between sanctions and economic asymmetry. Plus, last call to apply to the coolest job in the universe, videos from Money as a Democratic Medium 2.0, the Dig tackles AI, David Dayen. . .
Symposium

Weapons Against the Weak

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Since the end of the Cold War, sanctions have served primarily as a way for relatively united Western powers — led by the United States — to impose their preferences on weaker states. The era of unipolarity that has facilitated such one-sided coercion is, however, drawing to a close, and with it perhaps the age of ever-proliferating sanctions.
Symposium

The Antinomies of “Peaceful” Sanctions

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The legal concept and practice of “peaceful sanctions” is ridden with contradictions. To understand these antinomies, and to make sense of the changes in the legal treatment of sanctions over time, we must attend to the material basis of the international legal order – namely, a global but contradictory, crisis-prone, and conflictual capitalist imperialism. . .
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: June 23, 2023

By LPE Editors

Aslı Ü. Bâli and Ntina Tzouvala kick off a new symposium on economic sanctions and TWAIL, Jessica Whyte explains why international law is incapable of seeing the harm caused by economic coercion, and Maryam Jamshidi argues that sanctions have empowered a new class of colonizers. Plus, Sandeep Vaheesan on the scourge of pay-for-delay by pharmaceutical companies,. . .
Symposium

Sanctions’ New Colonizers

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In this moment of U.S. financial imperialism, a host of “new” colonizers have emerged, including private plaintiffs holding unsatisfied civil judgments against so-called terrorists, terrorist organizations, and countries designated by the U.S. State Department as state sponsors of terrorism. And just as the colonizers of yesteryear used imperial policies. . .

LPE Masthead

Managing Editor James Brandt Editoral Board Zohra Ahmed Corinne Blalock Veena Dubal Luke Herrine Amy Kapczynski Aziz Rana Kate Redburn Ntina Tzouvala Lisa Washington Noah Zatz Student Editors Liz Brown Edie Conekin-Tooze Eve Zelickson
Student Editor Emeriti Sam Aber Ashraf Ahmed Will Bloom Adam H. Bradlow Matthew Buck Brett Davidson Isabel Echarte Tariq El-Gabalawy Berto Elysee Molly Gordon Jeff Gordon Ruthie Lazenby Talya Lockman-Fine Chloe Miller Andrew Miller Roxana Moussavian Lydia Nicholson Ure Obioma