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Essay

Zarda, Just Work, and the Limits of Antidiscrimination Law

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Today, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument on the question of whether Title VII’s prohibition on sex discrimination includes sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination. To provide context to this case, the LPE Blog asked two scholars for contributions that detail the history of sex discrimination protections and address how law. . .
Essay

Looking Beyond the Law: The Movement for LGBTQ Rights at Work

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LGBTQ workers have never turned solely to the law to define or protect their rights. In years when many feminists and workers of color were narrowing their focus to pursuing individual advancement under antidiscrimination provisions like Title VII, LGBTQ workers articulated a new kind of right: to be fully oneself at work. They argued that sexuality and. . .
Essay

AB5: Regulating the Gig Economy is Good for Workers and Democracy

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Poverty is not a suspect classification under our Constitution, but it is an affront to life and dignity and to democracy more broadly.  With the evisceration of the U.S. welfare state and the judiciary’s deference to political outcomes in the area of “economics and social welfare,” employment is the primary legal and political means to address. . .
Essay

The Market Does Not Bind Us

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The central fallacy of the arguments against the Loan Shark Prevention Act, including Professor Fleming’s, is the limitation of regulation to merely attempting to steer the market. I argue here the purpose of regulation should instead be to carry out a democratic vision of how our society, including the economy, functions. The Loan Shark Prevention Act. . .
Essay

A Single Federal Usury Cap is Too Blunt an Instrument

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In May 2019, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unveiled the Loan Shark Prevention Act, a bill that would cap the cost of consumer credit nationwide. Under the bill, the total cost of a loan, calculated as an annualized percentage rate (APR), could not exceed 15%. If fees and interest are capped at 15% APR, lenders cannot recoup. . .
Symposium

The Democratic Political Economy of Administrative Law

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The modern administrative state has always faced ongoing debates about the appropriate balance between administrative authority and procedural constraint. But this moment of debate is about more than just the familiar clashes between “big government” and “free market” visions of political economy. These attacks on the administrative state—and the. . .
Symposium

Policymaking as power-building

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Many of the critical day-to-day governance decisions — from zoning to civil rights enforcement to worker protections, financial regulations, and consumer rights — take place within the administrative state. Without a greater degree of democratic responsiveness and accountability within the administrative process, these substantive rights are unlikely to. . .
Symposium

A New Sex Positivity Dichotomy

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Though feminists and queer theorists love the subversiveness of proclaiming “hoe is life,” they are also married to the idea that eventually they will be monogamous. While it is perfectly natural and okay for them to have sex with anyone they want and to extoll “safer kinky sex,” many still believe that paying for sex sullies the interaction, or. . .
Symposium

Sex, Markets, and Political Economy

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Among the various perspectives utilized to understand sex work, a political economy approach directs attention to the fundamentally political and moralized nature of markets. Markets are not abstract spaces for economic transactions but rather politically contested terrains of societal struggle where competing actors wield technical legal tools and moralized. . .
Symposium

The Law and Political Economy of Sex Work: Symposium

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People interested in law and political economy have a particular reason to listen to people in the sex trades. The conversations that sex workers are having are about markets, work, and coercion under neoliberalism. They are critiques of a legal system that implements policing to keep the “sacred” out of markets while enabling corporations to profit on. . .
Announcement

Reminder: LPE Conference Proposals due Sept 15

By LPE Editors

Just a reminder that paper and panel proposals for the LPE Project’s Conference, “Law and Political Economy: Democracy After Neoliberalism” (April 3-4, 2020, at Yale Law School) are due one week from today, September 15. You can find the call for papers here.  One clarification: Panel proposals should include a description of the panel as…

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