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Symposium

An Abolitionist Horizon for Child Welfare

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This post is part of a series on Black Lives Matters. The COVID-19 pandemic and police killings of George Floyd and other Black men and women have starkly revealed society’s race and class-based inequality and brought unprecedented attention to the excesses of the carceral state. One arm of punitive state regulation, however, has gone largely undiscussed:…
Essay

Carceral Feminism at a Crossroad

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In this watershed moment when policymakers feel liberated to embrace noncarceral responses to the behaviors that laws label crimes, one question rings out: “What about rape and domestic violence?” The pro-policing contingent intends this as a rhetorical “gotcha.” But many progressives open to meaningful reform genuinely worry about the demise of. . .
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: July 31, 2020

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This week at the blog…

Noah Zatz analyzed the ways in which the CARES Act does and (mostly) does not support care work. He argues that the prioritization of supporting the formal employment market makes the support for care work maddeningly indirect and even perverse, especially as the pressure builds for returning kids to school.

The. . .
Essay

Rent Cancellation: Social Protection in Uncertain Times

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With the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, interlocking structural inequities in health, employment, and racial justice have buffeted vulnerable populations. The looming “eviction apocalypse” sits at the nexus of these three ills. Black and Latinx people have the highest COVID infection, death, and unemployment rates nationwide. Mass. . .
Essay

Where Is the Care in the CARES Act?

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Two pandemic policy stories have been coming to a head: (1) the push for another relief bill as a key CARES Act unemployment insurance benefit expires on July 31, and (2) the ongoing national child-care crisis as school closures for the fall are announced amidst the virus’ resurgence. What connects them is. . .

fat cat capitalist cartoon
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: July 24, 2020

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This week at the blog… Ivana Isailović analyzed the political struggles over working from home through the lenses of social reproduction and workers’ control over their time, comparing policy responses in France and the U.S. and Katharine Jackson argued that LPE should borrow some analytical tools from political theory to separate out different. . .
Essay

Situating the Role of Democracy in LPE

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One of LPE’s foundational commitments, as Sanjukta Paul reminds us, is that law constitutes markets – and that, as a result, we are free to constitute them differently. But this simply begs the question: how ought we constitute them? This is where political theory can be useful. As Sam Bagg points out, many LPE scholars already. . .
Essay

The “New Normal” Privatization of the Workplace

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As the COVID-19 crisis rages on, individuals around the world are now thrown into a work-from-home, digitally-enabled “new normal” of the workplace. For most white-collar workers, homes have become offices, and boundaries between work and domestic life are being reshuffled. This shift, however, is just an acceleration of prior developments well. . .

fat capitalist cartoon
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: July 17, 2020 (Featuring New Editors!)

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This week at the Blog… we continued our symposium on the legal representation of poor people. On Monday, Gregory Louis argued that critical legal practice requires a critical realist approach to law: looking everywhere, not just courts, to interfere in the political contests that structure and restructure governance regimes. On Tuesday, Sam. . .
Symposium

The Clean Sea Breeze of Bad Men

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This is part of our symposium on the legal representation of poor people. In Professor Hershkoff and Loffredo’s post contextualizing their comprehensive handbook within the LPE movement, we can detect a certain irony. As they acknowledge, many lawyers, particularly those trained at elite institutions, eschew the representation of low-income communities. . .
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: July, 2020

By LPE Editors

This week at the blog… we began a symposium on the legal representation of poor people, part of our ongoing conversations of LPE praxis. Helen Hershkoff and Stephen Loffredo kicked off the symposium by explaining why they wrote their manual for providing legal services for people with low incomes and how they understand the sort…