At the Blog
On Monday, Matthew Lawrence argued that to assess the influence of interest groups on our politics, we need to distinguish between ordinary groups and legally-empowered super-groups. The latter, such as the American Medical Association, are largely creatures of law, as legal privileges granted to their members play determinative roles in their formation, enrichment, and continued durability and coherence. This makes them legitimate targets for democratic contestation, and we should think carefully about how to shape their influence toward constructive ends.
On Wednesday, Henry Tonks reviewed Mehrsa Baradaran’s The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America. Baradaran’s account of neoliberalism is far more ambitious than most, touching on everything from empire to civil rights to campaign finance and antitrust, while documenting how favorable conditions for corporate interests became encoded in U.S. jurisprudence after the 1960s. Tonks worries, however, that in identifying neoliberalism as the historical phenomenon that overthrew the midcentury–postwar consensus, the account glosses over contradictions stitched into the fabric of America’s “liberal consensus” that helped pull it apart.
In LPE Land
Are you heading to AALS? If so, make sure to drop by the informal critical / political economy happy hour, hosted by The Law and Political Economy Project (that’s us!) and the Critical Legal Collective. Thursday, Jan 9, 4:30pm-6:30pm at Novela, 662 Mission Street.
Over at the Roosevelt Institute, Katie Wells and Funda Ustek Spilda released a new brief about Uber for Nursing: How an AI-Powered Gig Model Is Threatening Health Care.
Cool new article alert: Kate Redburn, “The Equal Right to Exclude: Religious Speech and the Road to 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis.”
Cool new article alert part deux: David Stein, “Toward an Intersectional Analysis of Money: Racial Capitalism, Stagflation, and Unemployment as Economic Policy.”
At Phenomenal World, Andrew Elrod and Tim Barker interview Thomas Ferguson about the 2024 US election.
For those who enjoyed our recent interview with Christopher Muller on race, labor, and incarceration, he recently discussed related issues on an episode of the Inequality Podcast devoted to the costs of mass incarceration.
