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LPE Blog

When All Social Problems Become Financial Problems

When it comes to government programs, credit support is often cheaper and less controversial than direct expenditures. Understand this, and you can understand why government officials have an incentive to define all sorts of social problems as financial ones. Government officials face considerable pressure to promote credit markets. Wall Street firms leverage. . .

Measuring the Sustainable Corporation

This post comes out of the early career workshop ‘Law and Political Economy in Europe’, which took place at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, at the University of Oxford, on the 7th of October 2019. For all the posts this series, click here. The impending climate crisis, the widespread social tensions and the burgeoning level of wealth and…

Join LPE at Law & Society 2020

Join LPE at the Law & Society Conference in 2020 as we expand the Law and Political Economy CRN (55)! There are only two and half days left to apply to the Law and Society Association (LSA) Conference, which will be held in Denver, Colorado, May 28 – May 30, 2020. All paper, panel, and session…

Weekly Roundup: November 15, 2019

The latest in LPE World: An interview with Bolivian anthropologist Raul Rodriguez Arancibia on the role of right-wing Christian leadership in the coup against Evo Morales (Related: NACLA Statement on the Coup in Bolivia: In Solidarity with Bolivians Resisting Military Intervention and Right-Wing Violence); Let Them Eat Tech: the Democratic Party’s love. . .

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

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: November 8, 2019

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. . .

The Need for Neodemocracy

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…. . .

Disrupting Doctrine at Penn Law

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…

LPE Society at Berkeley Law

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: November 1, 2019

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…

LPE: A Rising Tide at Miami Law?

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…

LPE Student Organizing at YLS

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.

The Constitutional Role of Economic Coordination Rights

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. . .