At the Blog
A special alert 🚨🚨: If you enjoyed our mini-series last week on Law and the Critique of Capitalism, you can purchase the full issue at a 25% discount using the code DISC25 (good until Dec. 10). The issue features work by Corinne Blalock, Amy Kapczynski, Wendy Brown, Ntina Tzouvala, Veena Dubal, Amna Akbar, Jack Jackson, John Whitlow, Angela Harris, and Duncan Kennedy.
This week, Sameer Ashar, Renee Hatcher, and John Whitlow kicked off a new symposium, discussing what a racial capitalism framework can contribute to law clinics, and how law clinics can help disrupt the infrastructure of racial capitalism. As they write, “We believe that a deeper theoretical understanding of racial capitalism will move us toward cases and projects that are focused on structural inequalities of power and that confront racial subordination (as well as other forms of identity-based subordination) more forthrightly. Our experiments in legal advocacy and radical solidarity, in turn, could and should inform current scholarly and theoretical debates, as the Black radical tradition receives greater attention across the legal academy and in interdisciplinary spaces.”
On Tuesday, Julia Hernandez and Tarek Ismail continued the symposium by describing how the family policing system extracts resources from communities of color and how law school clinics can disrupt this system through the practice of radical early defense. This approach, which seeks to represent families at the earliest moment possible in sub-judicial spaces, helps restrict the state’s coercive encroachment into a family’s life. As they write, “When a parent refuses consent with the backing of a radical early defense team, they force FPS agents to make decisions about how to best use their resources – whether to seek a warrant, to seek some other means of completing their investigation, or to forego an unnecessary investigation entirely.”
And on Thursday, Alicia Virani criticized binary thinking in the criminal legal system due to conceptual and material scarcity and called for pedagogical approaches that allow students to think holistically about the harms involved in their work. As she writes, “Ignoring the harm caused when one is on the side of the accused also narrows the possibilities of the interactions one has with clients. If a client caused someone harm, it is part of a fully human experience to be able to show remorse, feel shame and regret, and make amends. While not every client will want to confront these feelings, many can and do.”
In LPE Land
The new kid on the block, The Sling, continues to kill it, with Sandeep Vaheesan discussing the dubious distinction between horizontal and vertical restraints in antitrust case law, and Brian Callaci arguing that a maximum-output standard in antitrust would fail workers.
For those in the DC area next Friday (Nov. 18), there will a (free) all-day conference on Reviving Progressive Constitutional Political Economy, which features, among others, LPE Stalwarts Sabeel Rahman, Willy Forbath, Yochai Benkler, Sanjukta Paul, Brishen Rogers, Ryan Doerfler, and Ganesh Sitaraman.
For those in the New Haven area next Thursday (Nov. 17), Zohra Ahmed will be discussing a work in progress, titled “The Price of Consent: Law and Political Economy in the War on Terror.”
