At the Blog
On Monday, Helen Hershkoff and Luke Norris explored how federal courts, wielding procedures that govern their subject matter jurisdiction, contribute to rising oligarchic conditions and declining democratic capacity. As they write, “subject matter jurisdiction is fundamentally about power—the power of courts to entertain claims, enforce laws, and constrain the behavior of powerful actors. And it is precisely for this reason that subject matter jurisdiction has featured so prominently in corporate efforts to twist legal frameworks to their own ends by undermining the efficacy of litigation as a mechanism for enforcing laws and regulations. Through strategic use of procedure and jurisdiction, oligarchic actors are able to insulate their power from statutory and regulatory constraints and to do so with the sanction of law.”
On Tuesday, Missy Risser-Lovings continued our symposium on Law Clinics and Racial Capitalism by explaining how syllabus design and client matter selection can help law school clinics build toward emancipatory futures. She argues that by helping students understand the broad extractive forces that shape the lives of precarious communities under racial capitalism, CUNY’s Community & Economic Development Clinic trains them to successfully partner with grassroots organizing groups.
And on Thursday, Stephanie Campos-Bui concluded our symposium by examining the inadequacy of traditional legal approaches to address the increasingly complex and interconnected social problems that face our communities. These approaches, she notes, are often reductive, slow-moving, and resource-intensive. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach, students in Berkeley’s Policy Advocacy Clinic are better able to locate creative, non-litigation strategies to address systemic racial, economic, and social injustice.
In LPE Land
Coolest job alert: The Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project (that’s us) seeks to hire an Academic Fellow, who will spend approximately 50% of their time working with the Executive Director, Faculty Director, and other affiliated academics on Project programming, and 50% of their time on their own scholarly research and writing, or other professional development activities.
On Monday (Nov. 21), join Phenomenal World for a (virtual) conversation on Jamie Martin’s hit new book The Meddlers, on the political origins of international economic governance, featuring Aaron Benanav, Adom Getachew, Jamie Martin, and Tim Barker.
Over at OnLabor, Sharon Block, Benjamin Sachs, and Tascha Shahriari-Arsa argue that labor law requires Amazon to permit workers to carry out a digital picket line on their site.
CFP: Proposals are due today(!) for an upcoming poverty law conference (“Poverty Law: Where Do We Go From Here?,” hosted by Berkeley Law on March 10-11, 2023).
You have slightly more time (Dec. 15) to get your act together and apply for the 2023 Law and Humanities Interdisciplinary Workshop, which is open to untenured professors, advanced graduate students, post-doctoral scholars, and independent scholars working in law and the humanities.
Cool job alert: Assistant Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College. NB: open to both PhDs and JDs.
