LPE Blog

Weekly Roundup: September 9, 2022

By LPE Editors

The week in review: Beth Popp Berman kicked off a symposium on Thinking like an Economist, Marshall Steinbaum argued that Berman’s account overlooks the alternative economic theories that were displaced by the economic style, and Kate Redburn analyzed the political-economic vision undergirding Supreme Court’s recent theocratic turn.. . .

Essay

The Law and Political Economy of Religious Freedom

By Kate Redburn

As recent Supreme Court cases make clear, the conservative legal movement seeks to replace the New Deal settlement not with a libertarian vision of market freedom, but rather an arrangement in which the market is embedded in a conservative Christian social vision.

Symposium

When It Comes to the History of Economics, Don’t Think like an Economist

By Marshall Steinbaum

In charting economists’ pernicious influence on public policy, Beth Popp Berman contrasts an “economic style,” which focuses on efficiency, choice, and competition, with an alternative approach that favors equality, stability, and democratic participation. But that framing is not faithful to the actual debates that took place, out of which. . .

Symposium

The Limits of “Thinking like an Economist”

By Elizabeth Popp Berman

Why have Democrats remained committed to an incrementalist, modestly ambitious vision of governance, even as the country has faced unprecedented challenges? One critical yet underappreciated piece of the explanation is the rise of a distinctive “economic style of reasoning” that has become prevalent in Washington.

Announcement

Postdoctoral Fellowship in Law and Political Economy at Harvard Law School, 2023-2025

By LPE Editors

Get paid to think about LPE? This could be your future.

Announcement

August Hiatus

By LPE Editors

The blog goes on August hiatus, a new primer on climate change, our top ten posts of the past year, and two new editors join the team.

Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: July 29, 2022

By LPE Editors

A clarion call for public ownership, the varieties of antimonopolism in the progressive movement, and human trafficking through the lens of status coercion.

Symposium

Status Coercion in the Context of Human Trafficking and Forced Labor

By Kathleen C. Kim

Anti-trafficking laws and policies in the United States — in particular, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) — define certain types of coerced work as unlawful forced labor. Paradoxically, the TVPA’s operation also enables status coercion by casting trafficked workers as either “victims” or “criminals” once they are removed from. . .

Essay

Recovering Contingency within American Antimonopoly and Democracy

By Laura Phillips Sawyer

William Novak’s New Democracy demonstrates that the long progressive era was devoted to a reconfiguration of the very nature of modern American capitalism. Yet we must not lose sight of the different visions of state, economy, and democracy that comprised the progressive project.

Essay

Who’s Afraid of Public Ownership?

By Jay Clayton

Despite growing interest in public ownership at the municipal and even national level, LPE scholars have expressed relatively little interest in the topic. This is a mistake: proposals for public ownership can unite the left by achieving multiple policy goals at once and provide an alternative vision of what society should look like.

Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: July 22, 2022

By LPE Editors

An LPE account of the global food crisis, two new entries in our symposium on Coerced, an amazing LPE job at HLS, a symposium on William Novak’s New Democracy, and some podcast episodes to help digest the Supreme Court’s most recent term.

Symposium

Just Do It: Sport, the Culture of Punishment, and Status Coercion

By Billy Hawkins

Playing through pain or while injured is a common practice in college athletics, as players fear losing access to the social mobility that their position makes available. Players are coerced to “just do it,” surrendering their agency to practices that border on deviant, both physically and psychologically.

Symposium

Status As Sword

By Michael M. Oswalt

While employers have long conflated status with vulnerability, workers are starting to show how status itself can also be as a source of power — one that the courts, co-workers, and the public increasingly see as justification for broad-based change.

Essay

LPE and the Global Food Crisis

By William Boyd

Due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, food prices are higher in real terms today than at any point since the early 1970s. Yet it is the underlying political economy of the global food system that has created the conditions where hundreds of millions of people don’t get enough to eat.

Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: July 15, 2022

By LPE Editors

A new symposium on Erin Hatton’s Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment, some awkward moments in radical real estate law, and a CFP for the Effect of Dobbs on Work Law.

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

Steffi Ostrowski Sohum Pal Alyssa Peterson Derrick Rice Michaeljit Sandhu Ann Sarnak Elliot Setzer Sarang Shah Isra Syed Zoe Tucker Emily Villano Henry Weaver Nick Werle Anna Wherry Jesse Williams Kate Yoon