On Monday, we continued the fall of legal theory, as Matthew Dimick considered the question on everyone’s mind: Is Capitalism ‘A Thing?’ According to Sam Moyn (and a long tradition in the CLS & LPE vein), capitalism and the ills it is said to generate are nothing more than a contingent jumble of various legal rules and regulations. Against this view, Dimick sets forth the idea that capitalism is the convergence of a peculiar constellation of social relations and institutions, in which society is subordinated to the process of capital accumulation. Such a Marxist conception of capitalism, he argues, gives us greater purchase on recent history than the legal reductionist view.
On Wednesday, the Blog editors engaged in our favorite autumnal activity: harvesting the most exciting forthcoming LPE and LPE-adjacent articles. With another submission season in the books, and our Twitter feeds abuzz with placement announcements, we gathered the hottest new articles on tech, labor, housing, the administrative state, criminal justice, family law, religious freedom, finance, legal theory, and so much more. Don’t click that link unless you ready to open some tabs and download some .pdfs.
In LPE Land
Calling all US students interested in LPE but without a campus group! We’ve created an ‘At-Large’ group just for you! Connect with fellow students across the country & explore LPE together! Don’t miss our first meeting of the year on Nov 10th at 11am!
For those in Cambridge: On Monday, Oct. 30, LPE@HLS will be hosting Abbye Atkinson, Chloe Thurston, and Emily Zackin, who will discuss Professors Thurston and Zackin’s forthcoming book, The Political Development of American Debt Relief. Lunch will be provided, and all are welcome.
Lenore Palladino graciously shared her Economic and Policy Data Dashboard, which includes more than 130 economic and policy datasets.
Over in the Sling, Sandeep Vaheesan and Brian Callaci argue that workers are an untapped resource for antitrust enforcers.
In a new paper, Ilyana Kuziemko, Nicolas Longuet Marx & Suresh Naidu show that the democrats’ betrayal of predistribution policies helps explain partisan realignment by education.
