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Essay

Restricting Women’s Autonomy in the Name of “Eugenics”

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The public/private dichotomy—so fundamental to the liberal political and economic order—produces many (if not all) of our lived contradictions, especially our experiences of inequality along the multiple and intersecting lines of race, sex, gender, class, able-bodiedness, and so on. It should come as no surprise that where the private decision making. . .
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: November 8, 2019

By LPE Editors

Greetings, friends! Recent media that might be of interest: For a look at market fundamentalism through the story of The Economist magazine, check out this article from the New Yorker. A book review of Bhaskar Sunkara’s The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality See the October 31 episode of Doug Henwood’s. . .
Essay

The Need for Neodemocracy

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We live in a neoliberal age. For ideological reasons bound up in the epic struggle against totalitarianisms both left and right, a bold experiment in hyper-liberalism took root in the wake of the Cold War. Allowing the democratic achievements and aspirations of liberal and social democracy to atrophy, intellectuals and policymakers began an audacious celebration…. . .
Symposium

Disrupting Doctrine at Penn Law

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This post continues our series featuring efforts to organize LPE student groups at several law schools. You can read the rest of the posts here. Why do people who believe in a more just, egalitarian society go to law school? Some of us hope to learn how the law can be used to disrupt the status…
Symposium

LPE Society at Berkeley Law

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This post continues our series featuring efforts to organize LPE student groups at several law schools. You can read the rest of the posts here. Berkeley holds a unique place in the public imagination as the home of the Free Speech Movement and the People’s Park protests, as Earl Warren’s alma mater, and as a reliable…
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: November 1, 2019

By LPE Editors

Here are some things we’re reading: Last week on the blog, we continued our series on labor and the Constitution. This week, we featured highlights from LPE student organizing. These days in Rawls: a review in the New Republic of Katrina Forrester’s book In the Shadow of Justice by Jedediah Purdy, and a review in…
Symposium

LPE: A Rising Tide at Miami Law?

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This post continues our series featuring efforts to organize LPE student groups at several law schools. You can read the rest of the posts here. Our introduction to Law & Political Economy came during the February 2019 Rebellious Lawyering Conference (“RebLaw”) at Yale Law School. The Miami Law chapter of the National Lawyers Guild sent six…
Symposium

Challenging Legal Education Through Student Activism at HLS

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At Harvard, institutional spaces for students to think about topics of law and justice remain limited, especially during the first year of law school when we are pummeled with work. While Harvard Law School has a rich history of student organizing, especially around teaching and academic appointments, we have had limited success in curriculum reform the. . .
Symposium

LPE Student Organizing at YLS

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Over the past year, student organizing has become an important part of the Law and Political Economy Project. This week we’re highlighting the work of several LPE student chapters. We hope that by amplifying their work, we can reach more students at more law schools.
Essay

The Constitutional Role of Economic Coordination Rights

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There’s a common notion that pervades legal and policy debate—including among fairly liberal Democrats—that collective bargaining mechanisms, and even public coordination of markets through minimum wages and working conditions, distort market outcomes and are therefore inefficient (though they may be justified by countervailing considerations). This. . .
Essay

A Law and Political Economy Agenda for Labor and the Constitution

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At the end of September, labor law scholars gathered at a conference focused on “Labor and the Constitution: Past, Present, and Future.”  There, a group of us considered the problem of “Political Economy and the Constitution”—and the extent to which the Law and Political Economy (LPE) analytical frame can be useful in building a more…
Essay

A Political Economy the Constitution Requires

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“Political economy” has an antique ring. More than a century ago, the field of “political economy” began to give way to what was called “economics.” By the mid-twentieth century, political economy was forgotten; economics ruled the roost. But what is old is new again. Political economy is coming back. Economics sidelines the distribution of. . .
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: October 18, 2019

By LPE Editors

What’s good in LPElandia? This week on the blog, we featured Allison Tait’s take on teaching Trusts and Estates from an LPE perspective. An interview with political scientist Alex Gourevitch on the history of labor republicanism in the United States over at The Dig. Gabe Winant wrote on the political valence of being in the “professional-managerial class”…. . .
Essay

Teaching Trusts & Estate as Critical Wealth Genealogy

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Step into a Trusts & Estates classroom and you’ll find the first thing most students learn is that the guiding principle in U.S. wealth transfer law is freedom of disposition. As the Restatement (Third) of Property tells us: “The organizing principle of the American law of donative transfers is freedom of disposition. Property owners have…

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Managing Editor James Brandt Editoral Board Amna Akbar Corinne Blalock Veena Dubal Luke Herrine Amy Kapczynski Caroline Parker Aziz Rana Kate Redburn Karen Tani Noah Zatz Student Editors Liz Brown Chloe Miller Sohum Pal Elliot Setzer 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 Andrew Miller Roxana Moussavian Lydia Nicholson