The intricate patterns of the Alhambra. The Knicks’ ability to blow a fourth-quarter lead. The sheer volume and quality of scholarship being produced by the LPE community. Some things you have to see to believe. Which is why we’ve put together the following (partial and necessarily incomplete) list of noteworthy new articles for your browsing pleasure.
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Amy Kapczynski,“Beyond the Market: What Does It Mean to Theorize Capitalism?” published in Law and Contemporary Problems. This article outlines a social conception of capitalism and explains how, from this perspective, law is neither the mere byproduct of economic forces, nor a master key, but rather helps constitute a social and institutional order that is characterized by patterned forms of domination and hierarchy.
Jocelyn Simonson & Sabeel Rahman, “The Part IV Problem in Legal Scholarship,” forthcoming in the Columbia Law Review Forum. This essay is a call to eliminate the de facto requirement that a law review article conclude with a list of actionable and feasible prescriptions, usually law or policy reforms, that respond to the questions or analysis at the heart of the article.
Sanjukta Paul, “Law and the Self-Coordinating Market Idea,” published in the University of Chicago Law Review. This article argues that modern legal and policy thinking is deeply shaped by the idea of a “self-coordinating market,” which functions both as a descriptive model of and normative framework for evaluating economic activity.
Yochai Benkler, “Structure and Legitimation in Capitalism: Law, Power, and Justice in Market Society,” published in Law and Contemporary Problems. This article introduces a new institutional political economy of capitalism that explains the distinctive dynamics that drive sustained productivity growth, recurring social dislocation, and persistent patterns of exploitation in modern market societies. It then analyzes the role of law in structuring social relations of production in capitalism and legitimating those structures so as to stabilize the asymmetric social relations they create.
Zohra Ahmed & Jocelyn Simonson, “Legal Satire in an Age of Political Repression,” forthcoming in the Buffalo Law Review. This article tells the story of a creative tactic through which the movement to Stop Cop City resisted the conspiracy and RICO charges against them, charges which were dismissed in December 2025. In doing so, the article also recounts a longer history stretching back to the first Red Scare of how left social movements have devised creative, strategic, and galvanizing ways to combat repressive criminalization.
Luke Herrine, “The Destabilizing Politics of Student Debt,” forthcoming in the Illinois Law Review. This article examines why student loans became central to higher education finance in the United States and how they have undermined their own centrality over time.
Madison Condon, “The Chicago School’s Coasean Incoherence,” forthcoming in NOMOS LXVIII: Climate Change. This article traces the divergent legal academic interpretations of the Chicago School’s Ronald Coase, revealing the law’s inconsistent conception of just what a corporation is or should be. It then argues for the resurrection of pre-neoliberal legal conceptions of the corporation as a moral entity and a locus for political change in our fight against the climate crisis.
Sabeel Rahman, “Towards a Reconstructive Politics,” published in Law and Contemporary Problems. This article calls for a reconstructive politics that seeks long-standing aspirations to a more inclusive and egalitarian democracy through radical transformations of our existing institutions, and explores what such an ethos might look like.
Laura Portuondo, “Free Exercise and the Redistribution of Liberty,” forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal. This article explains how the Supreme Court’s recent free exercise doctrine, which entitles religious litigants to state funding to support their religious exercise, departs from the dominant market-based theory of liberty that has prevailed since the 1970s. In practice, this doctrinal shift redistributes resources toward conservative religious actors and away from marginalized groups.
Amy Kapczynski, “Realism, Law and Economics, and LPE Now,” published in the University of Chicago Law Review. This article describes how LPE scholarship relates to and differs from two other major legal schools of thought that have notably engaged questions of political economy: the legal realism associated with Professor Robert Hale and the law and economics movement associated with Professors Richard Posner, Steve Shavell, and Louis Kaplow.
Odette Lienau & Aziz Rana, “Legal Method and Political Time,” published in Law and Contemporary Problems. This article argues that contemporary legal scholars must attend to the ways in which political time can shape the methods of their profession, preferring or disfavoring some methods and scholarly approaches relative to others.
Ntina Tzouvala, “Dollar Hegemony as International Law-making Power,” forthcoming in the Chinese Journal of International Law. This article demonstrates that dollar hegemony operates as a form of international law-making power, and that the United States has exercised this power in contradictory ways. These contradictions arise from the fact that a globalized political economy remains mediated by domestic legal and political forms.
Ntina Tzouvala & Jessica Whyte, “From Dollar Hegemony to Dollar Dominance,” forthcoming in Law and Critique. This article describes and diagnoses a major shift in the modalities, uses, and legal forms of the international role of the US dollar. This shift, from dollar hegemony to dollar dominance, has triggered efforts by other states to hedge, but not outright abandon, the dollar as the dominant currency of global capitalism.
Ganesh Sitaramin, “Public Utility Law as Anti-Oligarchy Regulation,” published in the Fordham Law Review. This article argues that NPU law—including rate regulation, market structure rules, nondiscrimination rules, and universal service requirements—is an essential form of anti-oligarchy regulation.
Joseph Fishkin & William E. Forbath, “Anti-Oligarchy, Anti-Authoritarianism, The Constitution, and the Court,” published in the UCLA Law Review. Drawing lessons from the New Deal era, this article argues that rather than abolishing judicial review or pursuing technocratic reforms that aim to put the Court above politics, liberals and progressives should adopt a more flexible and pragmatic approach that takes the Court seriously as a political body—one that can sometimes be persuaded to back off through political confrontation.
Ryan Doerfler and Sam Moyn, “The Post-Legitimacy Court,” forthcoming in the Supreme Court Review. This article proposes that the Supreme Court’s majority has relinquished legitimacy as a criterion of its own performance and suggests. In response, we should embrace an already emerging framework for institutional reform, lessening or abolishing its authority
rather than making its exercise seem apolitical once again.
Amna Akbar and Ryan Doerfler, “Imperfect Guardians,” forthcoming in the California Law Review. This article argues that the classic liberal defense of the courts depends on an unstated conjecture that elites are more enlightened than popular majorities. Yet confidence in the the comparatively reactionary character of ordinary, working-class, and poor people in the United States is in no way proportional to the evidence.
Ganesh Sitaraman, “The Secular Decline of the American State,” published in the NYU Law Review. This article outlines fifteen dynamics in American politics, law, policy, and society that all push in the direction of the secular decline of the state.
Yiran Zhang, “Family Caregiving as Work,” forthcoming in the University of Minnesota Law Review. This article identifies a “work contradiction,” in which classifying caregiving as employment brings certain benefits (workplace rights, access to social insurance) while also imposing certain harms (loss of housing subsidies, income garnishment). To resolve this contradiction, it argues in favor of a hybrid framework that combines labor and welfare protections to better reflect caregivers’ realities.
Samuel Bagenstos, “COVID and the Great Retrenchment,” forthcoming in the Houston Law Review. This article seeks to explain why the COVID-era expansion of universal public benefits did not prove to be as durable as the prevailing policies-make-politics story predicted. It argues that this story errs by treating the costs imposed by an expansion of cash or health benefits as diffuse and thus ignores the way that powerful economic actors can see new benefits programs as a particular, focused threat to their economic and workplace hegemony.
Zephyr Teachout, “The Nondiscrimination Principle,” published in the Fordham Law Review. This article argues that American law has a long tradition of treating economic discrimination with suspicion. It contends that this tradition was abandoned in the second half of the 20th century, and that reviving it is essential to addressing modern forms of economic and digital inequality driven by concentrated private power.
Sarah Lynnda Swan and Cynthia Godsoe, “Race, Space, and The New Legal Geographies Of Banishment,” forthcoming in the Georgetown Law Journal. This article maps and theorizes a new shift in practices of legal banishment. Drawing on Young Thug’s ten-year banishment from Atlanta, a recent ordinance in Jacksonville that criminalizes the presence of undocumented persons, and City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, it shows how modern banishment reinforces racial and class divisions, contributing to more segregated and exclusionary urban spaces.
Ben A. McJunkin, “Exploring Unhoused Agency,” forthcoming in the Boston University Law Review. This article argues that viewed through the lens of agency theory, many common experiences of unsheltered individuals (including resistance to shelter, begging, self-medication, and the construction of encampments) take on new meaning. It then offers a suite of legal reforms and litigation strategies designed to elevate the agency of unhoused individuals.
Sandeep Vaheesan, “Lawbreaking as a Method of Competition,” forthcoming in the American University Law Review. In a range of industries, firms choose to compete by violating laws protecting consumers, workers, businesses, and the public and obtaining an unfair cost or other advantage over their rivals. This article argues that, given its elastic antitrust authority, the Federal Trade Commission should prosecute such large-scale lawbreaking as an unfair method of competition.
Sanjukta Paul, “The Basis of the Labor Exemption Reconsidered,” forthcoming in Antitrust Law Journal. This paper examines a common-sense understanding of the basis for the labor exemption—that a type of vulnerability or power attaching to labor relationships justifies certain rights to engage in economic coordination that would not otherwise be due—while aiming to identify and advance a basis for labor coordination rights that it not quite as dependent on the finding of pre-existing power.
Marshall Steinbaum, Vincent Mancini, & Robert Stutchbury, “An Antitrust Exemption for Collective Bargaining by Independent Contractors,” published in the Antitrust Law Journal. This article proposes a statutory antitrust exemption for economically dependent actors operating outside formal employment relationships. Unlike existing and proposed exemptions, which focus on specific legal classifications (e.g., employees, farmers, or publishers), this proposal targets actors whose autonomy is constrained by parallel vertical restraints imposed by dominant firms.
John Mark Newman, “Lawless Antitrust,” published in the Fordham Law Review. This article argues that for decades antitrust jurisprudence has been radically unmoored from law, and that a central aim of the new antimonopoly movement has been to restore the role of law to antitrust.
Alexander A. Boni-Saenz, “Age, Law, and Political Economy,” forthcoming in the Indiana Law Journal. This article argues that age is an essential dimension for the analysis of law and political economy. Age-based status hierarchies help to define lower-status groups and to justify their labor market exploitation. At the same time, intergenerational conflict serves to displace class anxieties onto age and generation, distorting political debates and hindering solidarity among those with similar economic interests.
Shelley Welton, “Building Public Renewables,” forthcoming in the Emory Law Journal. This Article examines emerging experiments in public renewables as a novel tool of climate change governance, using New York and the United Kingdom as case studies. It theorizes these experiments as a response to challenges in state capacity and demonstrates how these innovative institutions may enhance state capacity to accelerate climate progress, while also improving energy affordability and better coordinating the energy transition.
Luke Norris, “The Class Action’s Anti-Authoritarian Roots,” forthcoming in the Washington & Lee Law Review. This article explains how the modern Rule 23(b)(2) class action arose as a tool for challenging the racial authoritarianism of the Jim Crow South, and explores the anti-authoritarian promise and limits of the class action, then and now.
Myriam Gilles & Luke Norris, “Procedure’s Unmooring: How the Federal Rules Lost Their Way,” forthcoming in University of Pennsylvania Law Review. This article tells the story of how the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure have become disconnected from their foundational commitments and aims, unearthing the neoliberal politics that ultimately shifted the procedural system away from early commitments to due process and justice.
Greg Baltz, “Landlord-Tenant Collective Bargaining,” forthcoming in the Cardozo Law Review. This article illustrates how tenant unions bargain private contracts by creating crises for landlords and shows how the limited liability company and the laws shaping the housing market limit the efficacy of building-based collective bargaining. It argues for a diversity of political economy-dependent tactics to secure individual tenant protections, win collective control of housing, and build political power.
Reilly Steel, “Systemic Corruption,” forthcoming in the Columbia Law Review. This article analyzes the rise of systematic corruption: the repeated manipulation of economic privileges by politicians to secure political loyalty, ranging from patronage in public employment to the use of merger review to reward allies and punish opponents. Drawing on reforms devised by earlier generations to curb systematic corruption, it offers a concrete, tractable framework for confronting today’s challenges.
Reilly Steel, “Lobbying Against Enforcement,” forthcoming in the Yale Journal on Regulation. Drawing on an original dataset of SEC investigations, corporate lobbying, PAC contributions, and campaign contributions by individual executives and directors, this article offers new empirical evidence that companies regularly use political spending to defend against enforcement.
Dan Rohde, “Who is a central bank for? The founding and legal design of the Bank of Canada,” published in American Journal of Legal History. This article offers the first legal history of the Bank of Canada’s founding, mapping the enormous public debate that accompanied the creation of the Bank and the various, often contradictory visions expressed for it.
Kate Elengold and Sophie Laing, “Offsetting Justice: Using Government Power To Collect Private Debts,” forthcoming in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. This article investigates the serious due process concerns that arise when the state operates as a third-party debt collector for private creditors, as well as the harm that such intervention poses to the larger society and economy.
Nila Bala, “Guilt by Parenthood,” forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal. This article argues that two recent developments—punitive parental liability and expansive parental rights—are not opposites but expressions of the same historical foundation: child coverture. By vesting parents with near-sovereign authority over children, the state obscures its own role in manipulating parental rights and liabilities to extend surveillance into the home.
Brittany Farr, “Warranting Violence,” published in the Stanford Law Review. Through an analysis of 152 appellate cases heard in five Southern states (Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia), this article finds that warranties of soundness were one of the few sites where the law intervened in the violence of slavery. By changing the risks and incentives associated with slaveowners’ violence, warranties of soundness also shaped the very forms that said violence took.
Gali Racabi, “In Lieu of the NLRA,” forthcoming in the Wisconsin Law Review. This article argues that labor law must flip its federal default by empowering and expanding state-level labor institutions and expanding gaps in NLRA preemption doctrine. Eighteen states already maintain NLRA-like statutory frameworks, and fourteen more recognize workers’ rights to unionize and act collectively as a state public policy. These under-examined laws hint at an alternative labor governance model in lieu of the NLRA.
Katharine Jackson, “Corporate Populism: Musk’s Challenge to the Rule of Law and Equity,” forthcoming in the Chicago-Kent Law Review. This article argues that theories of populism can provide traction for those seeking to understand what is going on at Twitter, Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink. Once one sees Musk as more Trump than Dimon, more Bolsonaro than Immelt, more Orban than Eiger, then one gains more clarity on the rhetoric, the tactics, and the performance of Elon Musk than most corporate law scholarship can provide.
Alvin Velazquez & Charlotte Garden, “The Divided States of Work Law: Regulating US Workplaces in the Age of AI,” forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Labour Law: A Global Overview. This chapter explains why federal regulation of employers’ use of AI or related technologies is unlikely and analyzes prospects for states to step into the breach.
Samuel Bagenstos, “The Crisis of Appropriations Law,” forthcoming in the Washington University Law Review. This article argues that the vision of interbranch relations that underlies appropriations law doctrine is breaking down and that courts are unlikely to be the solution to this problem. It then identifies steps Congress should take to reclaim its power.
Kate Andrias, “The Contested Constitution: Plutocrats, Right-Wing Populists, and Labor Rights in the U.S.,” forthcoming in Rivista Di Diritti Comparati. This article considers the seemingly opposing camps regarding labor rights in the contemporary American Right—the “plutocrat wing” and the “populist wing.” It situates their views on labor rights amid the historical debate about such rights in the United States and then contrasts the plutocrat and populist approaches with the contemporary labor movement’s own aspirations for labor rights.
William E. Forbath and Yosef Malka, “Class Struggle and Group Rights on the Lower East Side: Radical Lawyering and the Making of a Socialist Pluralist Constitutional Imaginary in the Early 20th Century,” forthcoming in The Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities. This Article explores the legal thought and advocacy, movement- and institution-building, and culture-shaping work of a handful of largely forgotten immigrant Jewish lawyer-leaders who helped create a new socialist pluralist constitutional imaginary in the United States during the first decades of twentieth century.
Elettra Bietti, “The Data-Attention Imperative,” forthcoming in the Florida Law Review. The article argues that human attention is increasingly exploited by data-attention platforms whose business models depend on capturing and monetizing users’ time and data. It contends that effective regulation must move beyond individual choice and instead restructure platform incentives through design, taxation, and legal reforms to protect time away from technology.
Benjamin Dinovelli, “The Myth of Credit Card Competition,” forthcoming in the Vanderbilt Law Review. The article argues that the extractive and regressive fees charged by credit card companies cannot be solved through increased competition. A better answer can be found in public utility law, which requires rates to be just and reasonable and forbids rate discrimination.
Alvin Velazquez, “Bankrupting Labor Power,” forthcoming in the Stanford Law Review. This article argues that bankruptcy law should forgive the liability that unions may incur from torts that arise as a result of engaging in an organizing or contract campaign on the same terms that corporations receive for engaging in illegal conduct.
Alvin Velazquez, “Bankruptcy as Presidential Resistance,” published in the Fordham Urban Law Journal Online. This article argues that cities could use bankruptcy as a tool for resisting the President’s attempts to freeze or clawback grant money.
Nicholas Stump, “Non-Reformist Reforms in Environmentalism: Legal Theory and Praxis,” forthcoming in the Pace Environmental Law Review. This Article explores how non-reformist reforms—as opposed to traditional environmental law—are required for ecologically transformative futures.
Arti Walker-Peddakotla, “Resisting Surveillance Procurement,” forthcoming in the Buffalo Law Review. Drawing on first-hand accounts, empirical evaluation of municipal records, and municipal board meetings, this article identifies four mechanisms that private surveillance companies use to ensure greater likelihood of surveillance procurement.
Jacob Schriner-Briggs, “Democratic Backsliding and the Limits of First Amendment Legalism,” forthcoming in the U.C. Irvine Law Review. The article assesses whether the First Amendment, interpreted and implemented by courts, can secure free speech against an executive branch intent on suppressing it. Its basic conclusion is that, while such legalism has supported important rulings against the administration, those seeking to unwind the speech crisis should look beyond it.
Jordan Laris Cohen, “Antidiscrimination Law Against Labor,”forthcoming in the American University Law Review. This article demonstrates that, in recent years, employer compliance with antidiscrimination law has emerged as a major justification for limiting the rights of employees to organize and engage in collective action in the workplace. It then argues that such justifications are either false or vastly exaggerated.
Tammy Katsabian, “Crowd Discrimination in the Digital Workplace: How AI and Platforms Translate Public Bias into Employment Practices,” forthcoming in the SMU Law Review. This article introduces the concept of crowd discrimination to explain how networked and smart technologies translate biases originating in customers, algorithms, and online communities into employment decisions across platform work, AI-driven management, and online shaming. It argues that existing antidiscrimination law, particularly Title VII, does not adequately capture these technologically mediated forms of discrimination, and it proposes a new procedural framework to better protect workers’ equality rights
Daniel I. Morales, “The (Im)materiality of Immigration Law,” forthcoming in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review. This article argues that immigration law has little to do with the practical logistics of managing people on the move but serves instead a more mystical purpose: legitimating and sustaining the status quo of the American social structure.
Hannah Bloch-Wehba, “How Tech Took Over,” forthcoming in the Brooklyn Law Review. This article argues that tech’s entrenchment in public governance requires both a new understanding of how tech companies became so powerful and a new account of the constitutional implications of this transformation. Decades of legal and policy interventions forged an enduring, expanding role for technology companies in statecraft, and, today, the tech industry plays a central role in securing American geopolitical dominance, supporting government infrastructure, and facilitating flows of data.
Michael Swerdlow, “Resurrecting Section 3 of the Clayton Act,” forthcoming in The University of Miami Law Review. The article argues that, since the 1980s, courts have wrongly nullified Section 3 of the Clayton Act by treating it as superfluous to the Sherman Act. It then develops a faithful Section 3 liability test, which it argues would restore a determinate prohibition on exclusionary sales practices.
Ramsay Eyre, “The Platformization of Music,” published in Columbia Journal of Law & The Arts. This article argues that recorded music is now a platform industry, and that addressing the challenges of the music industry’s platformization will require adapting and applying tools from the NPU law, including rate regulation, nondiscrimination rules, and structural separations.
Jacob Hamburger, “Federalism by Extortion,” forthcoming in Publius: The Journal of Federalism. This article examines how the Trump administration’s use of extortion tactics to force compliance with its political agenda has shaped intergovernmental relations. Although constitutional principles limit the federal government’s ability to coerce state and local action, the administration and its congressional allies have repeatedly raised the cost of noncompliance, revealing a political economy in which federalism’s safeguards appear weaker than assumed.
Niall O’Shaughnessy, “Worker Participation and Europe in the Long 1970s: A Crisis of Integration and a Crisis of Capitalism,” published in European Law Open. This article shows how ideas around industrial democracy penetrated European politics in the early 1970s before the collapse of the post-war economic order provided cover for an employer backlash. This backlash coalesced around a series of arguments that we would now recognise as neoliberalism, allowing capital to reestablish its position over labour in this specific context.
Francisco J Quintana, “Dollar Dominance, De-dollarization, and International Law,” published in the Journal of International Economic Law. This article argues that the ongoing competition between dollar dominance and emerging de-dollarization efforts is not merely economic or geopolitical: it is also legal. It reconstructs dollar dominance as a network of legal norms, practices, and institutional arrangements that sustains unequal global relations, and then shows how BRICS states are developing legal tools and institutional mechanisms to reduce their exposure to the dollar.
Monica Iyer, “Law and Petro-Masculinity,” forthcoming in Ecology Law Quarterly. This article examines how petro-masculinity may be expressed and endorsed by those crafting law and policy in the United States and other countries, and explores the possibility of addressing stereotypical social constructions of gender in order to meaningfully combat the inequalities and harms to which they give rise.
Ali Zane, “Law, Political Economy, and Organizing for Tenant Power,” forthcoming in Georgetown Journal of Poverty Law and Policy. This article offers a primer for the movement lawyering-curious on the contemporary tenant power movement: why tenants are organizing into unions, what theory of power guides organizers (and how they differ from the theories of power we are accustomed to as lawyers), and how law and lawyers can help build tenant power, instead of being an obstacle.
Brooke Depenbusch, “The Long War on Welfare: Taxpayer Activists and the Politics of Backlash in Depression-era America,” published in Journal of American History. Focusing on the second half of the Great Depression, this article examines how taxpayer activists launched a series of public campaigns directed at restricting the growth and generosity of the relief safety net. The article shows how coalitions of employers, homeowners, and growers across the country—alarmed by the costs and redistributive potential of expanded state and local relief programs—worked together to weaken these social welfare programs.
Kevin Byrne Keller, “The World Bank and the Origins of Chinese State Capitalism,” forthcoming in the Berkeley Journal of International Law. This article describes how the World Bank, in contrast to how it operated in much of the rest of the world, did not push China toward the privatization of state-owned enterprises, but rather helped the Chinese government strengthen those enterprises.
Debadatta Bose, “Postcolonial Private Law,” forthcoming in the Brooklyn Law Review. The article argues for a paradigm shift from international to private law and from distributive to interpersonal justice in theorizing postcolonial futures. It demonstrates that daily injustices inflicted by transnational corporations are fundamentally matters of private law, such as contract and tort. By reclaiming private rights of action, the article reconceptualizes private law as a vital instrument in visualizing ideal postcolonial futures.
Jevgeniy Bluwstein, “The Trouble with Carbon Budgets, Offsets and Removals in Climate Litigation against States: The Case of KlimaSeniorinnen v. Switzerland at the ECtHR,” published in the European Journal of International Law. Drawing on KlimaSeniorinnen v. Switzerland, this article argues that the ECtHR judgment highlights the limits of climate litigation against states at a time of exhausted carbon budgets and an overreliance on questionable carbon offsets and highly speculative carbon removal promises.
Bijal Shah, “Envisioning a Protective Administrative Law Framework,” forthcoming in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. This essay explores the idea that administrative law tools drawn from the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) could be utilized to protect people engaging with or targeted by the administrative agencies, including as directed by the President, in a manner that is complementary to—but distinct from—civil rights and constitutional law models.
Ximena Benavides, “Medical Progress Financialization,” forthcoming with Colorado Law Review. This article argues that the progress–access gap in life sciences innovation is not a drug pricing failure problem alone, but a result of the financialization of medical progress—a process through which private actors have redefined innovation around market expansion and value capture, displacing public health aims.
Ximena Benavides, “Too Big to Lose Weight: How Pharmaceuticalization Corrupts the Right to Health,” published in Harvard Health and Human Rights. This paper adopts a moral and political economy perspective to examine the pharmaceuticalization of obesity and its intersections with mental health, revealing its implications for health systems in the United States and low- and middle-income countries, undermining the realization of the right to health and redefining medical progress as market expansion and control.
