At the blog
On Monday, Ted Hamilton looked at an understudied but central aspect of environmental law: the use of state and corporate violence to compel the extraction and consumption of oil, gas, and coal. As he observes, “Since Standing Rock, government and private enterprise have grown more sophisticated in their approach to building pipelines and shipping fuel. Anticipating resistance to these projects, they secure political support from the highest state authorities while simultaneously targeting grassroots activists with laws that ban protests against ‘critical infrastructure’ (pipelines, refineries, and ports) and with frivolous lawsuits that drain resisters’ money and time.” The climate justice movement’s legal strategy thus must grapple not only with the inadequacies of the Clean Air Act or the limits of tort law, but also with the climate-criminal legal system nexus.
On Wednesday, Pamela Foohey discussed bankruptcy’s importance for American households in a society marked pervasive inequality. As she notes, single women make up almost forty percent of bankruptcy filers, black households file for bankruptcy at more than twice the rate they appear in the general population, and elderly Americans are filing for bankruptcy at twice the rate they were three decades ago. “Although changes to bankruptcy law cannot materially address systemic racism, pay disparities, gaps in childcare and healthcare, the cost of education, and the economic effects of divorce, modernizing bankruptcy law can chip away at some disparities.”
And on Thursday, we announced the wet hot anti-monopoly summer academy. Our brand new AMRI webpage includes lecture videos and readings from last year’s summer academy, as well as tools to track your progress through the course. We are encouraging anyone interested to take the course online in groups, either with our official LPE student groups, or with our at-Large group that anyone can join. Click here for details.
In LPE Land
We invite rising second- and third-year law students from New York City law schools to apply to The Action Lab (TAL), the Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project and the Initiative for Community Power’s first ever Summer Academy on Law, Organizing, and Power Building. The Academy will introduce a small cohort of law students to critical LPE and organizing frameworks, with a focus on housing justice and decarceration. Sessions will be led by a mix of LPE academics, including Marika Dias, Amy Kapczynski, Marbre Stahly-Butts, and John Whitlow; and movement leaders from New York based organizations Make the Road New York and VOCAL-NY. Dates: Aug. 16-18. Deadline to Apply: June 28. For more information, see the full posting here.
Over at Balkinization, Aziz Rana writes about Du Bois and the Project of Constitutional Transformation. As a wise woman once told us: one should always read Aziz Rana given the chance.
