Next week, the Association of Law and Political Economy will elect its first Board of Directors—another step on the road to becoming a democratically constituted, self-sustaining organization. Candidate statements will be released later this week, and balloting will run from June 19 through June 26. Statements will only be circulated to membership, so make sure to become a member by Friday if you want to vote in the election!
To mark this milestone, the Blog is bringing you some special, on-the-ground coverage from Richmond, Virginia, where nearly 500 attendees gathered for the association’s inaugural conference this past February. Today, we visit a plenary session on the past, present, and future of LPE. To kick off that session, Amy Kapczynski, Corinne Blalock, Aslı Bâli, Sabeel Rahman, Angela Harris, and Yochai Benkler participated in a short lightning round, where they were asked to answer a series of questions about LPE in no more than two sentences.
** ** **
What is LPE?
Amy Kapczynski: LPE is a community of scholars and thinkers committed to bringing political economy to the center of legal debates and working reparatively to democratize the political economy. Democracy in this context is not a liberal conception but a materialist or even socialist one that demands both freedom and equality.
Corinne Blalock: LPE is a scholarly approach that examines law’s complicity in the structuring and legitimation of economic inequality and racial and gender subordination, as well as the devaluation of social and ecological reproduction. In short, the courts will not save us and capitalism is the problem.
Sabeel Rahman: LPE is a disposition, and that disposition has three components: a north star committed to genuine emancipation across all dimensions of structure; an orientation to the actual legal, institutional, and economic structures that keep us from that vision of emancipation; and a view of both critique and construction.
Angela Harris: LPE is both a scholarly formation and a community, and its focus is on generating new left progressive scholarship at the intersection of political economy and law. This is an endeavor that crosses geographical and intellectual borders, and ranges across disciplines.
Yochai Benkler: LPE is a loose coalition of broadly left-leaning and progressive legal scholars trying to create a network of broadly like-minded people. It should become a far more coherent approach to legal scholarship, analysis, and programmatic transformation that can transform the way the legal profession thinks about what it does and how it influences the world.
Aslı Bâli: LPE is a left critical formation that is trying to build intellectual community in a way that empowers real community, and it uses an interdisciplinary approach to studying law that emphasizes how legal rules and institutions actively shape economic outcomes, political power, and social hierarchy.
Is LPE a reaction to law and economics?
Yochai: No. LPE is a reaction to the crisis of neoliberalism and the failure of the American left legal scholarship to develop a sustained way of thinking theoretically and programmatically about economic inequality and class conflict, at a time that it is becoming increasingly clear that, without being able to think methodically about capitalist social relations, we will cede all the ground of class ressentiment to the fascists.
Angela: My answer is “yes, and.” It is a reaction to law and economics, in that it’s become an intellectual home for some left legal academics who want to think about the relationship between law and economic activity, and have been frustrated with the limited tools and language of traditional law and economics. The “and” part is that this does not capture everything that you need to know about LPE, because people in this community have entered through many doors.
Sabeel: No, I would say it’s a reaction against multiple forms of antipolitics, of which law and economics is but one.
Corinne: Not a reaction per se, but considering that law and economics was undeniably hegemonic inside law schools, not to mention in governance structures, at the time of LPE’s emergence, it’s a central and worthy target.
Amy: Yes, though not only that. Law and economics elevated efficiency as a singular and technical value, in effect insisting on the primacy of the economic over the political. We are instead trying to rejoin the political and the economic and trying to imagine what it would mean to collectively shape our political economy as equals.
Aslı: It is partly a response to the dominance of law and economics, in order to contest ideas about market neutrality, efficiency, and value-free legal analysis, but also a revival, transformation, and even reconstruction of older critical and institutional traditions.
Does LPE have a method?
Sabeel: I’d say yes, but I think all methods are just dispositions. So, LPE is a method insofar as all methods are just orientations.
Angela: No, it’s methodologically all over the place, but I don’t think that’s a problem.
Yochai: No, but it should. As long as LPE lacks broadly shared methods and frameworks that could in principle reshape the way the legal profession sees its own work and products, LPE as an intellectual movement is unlikely to have a sustained impact on legal transformation of the type that law and economics and the conservative legal movement had, even if specific papers or works may have profound effects in specific fields or on specific issues.
Corinne: I don’t think it has a method, but I think it asks a particular set of questions and refuses a particular set of assumptions. And although I hope we continue to wrestle with questions of method and theory, I agree with Sabeel that I don’t think most intellectual movements have as clean a method as we imagine them to.
Aslı: From the TWAIL perspective, we would often answer this question in the way I think LPE should by saying yes, but not a single unified method, rather a methodological orientation that foregrounds the constitutive role of law and centers questions of power. To give a succinct description of that methodologically pluralist orientation, it is to denaturalize legally constructed outcomes, focus on how law allocates power and resources, analyze the role of institutions in shaping outcomes, and consider the historical context that has influenced existing arrangements.
Amy: My answer is “sort of.” LPE is invested in a critique of political economy—so, for example, dereifying markets in the “economy”—but also in combining that with reparative work, by which I mean work that addresses deep forms of subordination, including race, gender, colonialism, in powerbuilding ways.
What should our normative north star be, or what is yours?
Angela: LPE’s normative north star should be a commitment to analyzing and also addressing law’s relationship to structural inequality. Structural inequality includes political, economic, and social inequality, and the work requires attention to the interconnections among all of these forms of inequality.
Yochai: Mine is real freedom in socialized markets: the freedom from market imperatives that’s necessary to develop a self-directed life and non-instrumentalized relations, and the pursuit of the fundamental restructuring of social relations of production that is a precondition to make that kind of freedom possible.
Amy: LPE’s north star should be democracy, because it is a system based on equality, but a materialist form, that would insist that we must all have freedom from want, for example, to truly govern as equals.
Aslı: My answer would be to reduce domination and subordination in the global political economy, while expanding democratic self-determination across borders. Another way to say this would be the democratization of the global political economy.
Corinne: Resisting fascism and moving towards socialism.
Sabeel: A clear-eyed view of the structures of subordination and domination and an aspiration towards emancipatory democracy.
** ** **
As you might expect, the following hour of the session involved an in-depth conversation unpacking these different perspectives, probing points of agreement and disagreement, and discussing where LPE should go in the future, both in terms of scholarship and as a movement. However, as OMC once sang: Wanna know the rest? Hey, attend the conference.
