This year, like every year, the LPE Blog did our best to illuminate the role of law in the creation and maintenance of capitalism, and to brighten the path toward a genuinely responsive, egalitarian democracy. Before the ball drops, and we continue our interminable journey through the Greek alphabet, here’s a look at the light we shed in 2021.
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Most of our posts were organized into symposia:
A Liberal Theory of Property Symposium
| Liberalism, Property, and the Means of Production | – David Singh Grewal, Jedediah Britton-Purdy |
| Property’s Contingent Categorization | – Nestor Davidson |
| Liberal Property Law vs. Capitalism | – Katharina Pistor |
| Property, Collectivity, and Restraint | – Rashmi Dyal-Chand |
| Property Without Autonomy | – Lua Yuille |
| Creating Space for Property’s Foes | – Ezra Rosser |
| Liberal Property for Skeptics, Part 1 | – Hanoch Dagan |
| Liberal Property for Skeptics, Part 2 | – Hanoch Dagan |
Universal Basic Income Symposium
| Considering and Critiquing Universal Basic Income: Introduction | – Noah Zatz |
| UBI and Immigrants: Lessons from the Pandemic | – Jennifer Gordon |
| Basic Income, Care, and Wages for Housework | – Almaz Zelleke |
| Universal Basic Income, Racial Justice, Climate Justice | – Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò |
| Basic Income and the Freedom to Refuse | – Noah Zatz |
| Leftist Benefits are In-Kind, Actually | – Lydia Nicholson |
| Reconstructing the Algebra of Race and Rights | – Raúl Carrillo |
Political Economy, Political Technology Symposium
The Free Market Family Symposium
| What is the “Free Market Family” and How Can We End It? | – Maxine Eichner |
| Universalism and Anti-Racism in Family Support | – Wendy Bach |
| Free Meals, “Free Markets”, and Infrastructure for Democracy | – Martha McCluskey |
| Family Choice and the American Dream | – Julie Suk |
Law and Settler Colonialism in Palestine Symposium
| Legitimated Vigilantism as Settler Colonial Policy | – George Bisharat |
| On Law and Racial Capitalism in Palestine | – Darryl Li |
| Tax Breaks for Colonization? | – Diala Shamas |
| System(s) of Domination: Historic Palestine as a Deeply Divided Space | – Fady Khoury |
| Jewishness as Property under Israeli Law | – Rabea Eghbariah |
The Neoliberal Republic Symposium
| The Neoliberal Republic: Corporate Lawyers, Statecraft, and the Making of Public-Private France | – Antoine Vauchez |
| Neoliberalism, Corporate law, and the Reconstruction of the French State | – David M. Trubek |
| Deconstructing the Public-Private Distinction in “The Neoliberal Republic” | – Ioannis Kampourakis |
| What Makes the Republic Neoliberal? | – Ivana Isailović |
| Public-Washing the Private Interest in International Investment Law | – Alessandra Arcuri |
Courts & Capitalism Symposium
| Market-Based Law Development | – Kathryn A. Sabbeth |
| On Courts, Exchanges, and Rights | – Matthew Dimick |
| Courts and Constitutional Political Economy | – Joseph Fishkin |
| On Judging Cases in the Context of Crisis | – Lynn Adelman |
Bonds of Inequality Symposium
| The Myth of Fair Share/Equal Share Bond Projects | – Nic John Ramos |
| Public Money without Public Goods | – David Stein |
| Histories of Hammers | – Monica Prasad |
| The Bondholders’ Veto: Fiscal Federalism and Local Democracy | – Brian Highsmith |
| Making Public Debt a Public Good | – Abbye Atkinson |
| The Same System, the Same Results | – Brittany Alston |
| Living in a Capitalist City With No Capital | – Dedrick Asante‑Muhammad |
| Using Legal Tools to Bring Debt and Equity into Balance | – Stacy Seicshnaydre |
| Unmasking Racial Capitalism’s Public Face | – John N. Robinson III |
| Municipal Debt: Illuminating Old Puzzles, Forcing New Questions | – Joy Milligan |
| Metaphors, Analogies, and the Politics of Understanding | – Destin Jenkins |
Vulnerability Theory Symposium
| Vulnerability Theory and the Political Economy of Resilience | – Martha McCluskey, Hila Keren, Ronit Donyets-Kedar |
| Countering Neoliberal Logic with the Vulnerable Human Subject | – Martha McCluskey |
| Resilience Drainage and the Role of Private Law | – Hila Keren |
| Beyond Neoliberalism: Allocating Resilience through Corporate Law | – Ronit Donyets-Kedar, Ofer Sitbon |
Cost-Benefit Analysis Symposium
| Cost-Benefit Analysis at a Crossroads: A Symposium on the Future of Quantitative Policy Evaluation | – Frank Pasquale |
| Climate Change, Racial Justice, and Cost-Benefit Analysis | – Lisa Heinzerling |
| Equity in Regulatory Cost-Benefit Analysis | – Zachary Liscow |
| Let’s Politicize Cost-Benefit Analysis | – Elizabeth Popp Berman |
| Modernizing Regulatory Review Beyond Cost-Benefit Analysis | – Melissa Luttrell, Jorge Roman-Romero |
| The Limits of the Cost-Benefit Worldview: A Disability-Informed Perspective | – Karen Tani |
| A Post-Neoliberal Regulatory Analysis for a Post-Neoliberal World | – James Goodwin |
| The “Value of a Statistical Life”: Reflections from the Pandemic | – Mark Silverman |
| The Shaky Legal and Policy Foundations of Cost-Benefit Orthodoxy in Environmental Law | – Amy Sinden |
Biden’s Competition EO Symposium
| Fair Competition Policy without a Fair Competition Philosophy | – Sandeep Vaheesan |
| The Labor Justice System | – Hiba Hafiz |
| Taking a “Whole-of-Government” Approach to Pharma’s Monopoly Power | – Amy Kapczynski |
JLPE Symposium
| The Regulatory Roots of Inequality in the U.S. | – Steven Vogel |
| The Road to Free-Market Family Policy | – Maxine Eichner |
| Milton Friedman’s Favorite Economy: Hong Kong in the Neoliberal Imagination | – Jamie Peck |
| LPE in Europe as Critique of Ordoliberalism | – Ioannis Kampourakis |
| Labor Governance in the Shadow of Racialized Mass Incarceration | – Noah Zatz |
| Economic Democracy at Work | – Lenore Palladino |
| Economic Law: Anatomy and Crisis | – Peer Zumbansen |
| What Do Franchisees Do? Vertical Restraints as Workplace Fissuring and Labor Discipline Devices | – Brian Callaci |
| How Governments (and Others) Should Present Complicated Information | – Darien Shanske |
Historicizing the Attack on CRT Symposium
| The Long History of Anti-CRT Politics | – Aziz Rana |
| Educational “Ownership” and the Backlash to CRT | – LaToya Baldwin Clark |
| Anti-CRT and a “Free Market” in Racial Education | – Diana Reddy |
Just Transitions Symposium
| Building the New: Just Transitions & LPE | – Angela P. Harris, Caroline Parker |
| The Contested Boundaries of Just Transitions Law | – David J. Doorey |
| A Just Transition from Mass Incarceration: The Case of Abolishing Youth Incarceration in Los Angeles | – Saúl Sarabia, Michael Z. Dean |
| REDD+ as the Stranger-King | – Keith H. Hirokawa |
| Building Local Food Pathways: Food Sovereignty and Climate Justice | – Antonia Eliason |
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But not all of our #content was organized into symposia. Here are our one-off posts, loosely organized by topic:
Market Governance
| The Politics of Price Making: Why LPE Needs to Engage with Market Design | – William Boyd |
| Markets: Collective Bargaining All the Way Down | – Luke Herrine |
| Pricing Power: Market Governance and the Texas Blackouts | – William Boyd |
| Paradoxes of Neoliberal Governance: How Markets Make States | – Amy Cohen, Jason Jackson |
| Woke Capital? | – James Fallows Tierney |
| Government Failures and Private Options | – Jon D. Michaels |
| The Legacy of the Rural Electrification Act and the Promise of Rural Broadband | – Christopher Ali |
Antitrust
| Don’t Trust the Antitrust Narrative on Farms | – Nathan Rosenberg, Bryce Wilson Stucki |
| Antimonopoly Is About Democratizing the Food System (and the Rest of the Economy) | – Claire Kelloway, Sandeep Vaheesan |
| School Segregation, Social Closure, and the Anti-Monopoly Analogy | – Erika K. Wilson |
| Coalminers and Coordination Rights | – Branden Adams |
Work
| Constitutionalizing Property’s Priority over Farm Worker Organizing: The Threat of Cedar Point | – Don Rhodes |
| Law and Organizing for Countervailing Power | – Kate Andrias, Benjamin Sachs |
| The Law & Political Economy of Disability Accommodations | – Shirley Lin |
| Labor Bargaining and the “Common Good” | – Diana Reddy |
| Excerpt: Implications of Cedar Point Nursery | – Nikolas Bowie, Veena Dubal, Amy Kapczynski, Corinne Blalock |
Housing
| What the UK Student Rent Strikes Reveal about Financialization | – Kiana Boroumand |
| The Case for Making Rent Disappear | – Sasha Plotnikova |
| Seven Reactions to the Eviction Moratorium Decision | – Kapczynski, Bowie, Raghuveer, Jackson, Whitlow, Emerson, Ahmed |
Speech
| After the “Great Deplatforming”: Reconsidering the Shape of the First Amendment | – Genevieve Lakier, Nelson Tebbe |
| Exit, Voice, and the First Amendment Treatment of Social Media | – Robert Post |
| The Pitfalls of Platform Analogies in Reconsidering the Shape of the First Amendment | – Ramya Krishnan |
| Towards a Media Democracy Agenda: The Lessons of C. Edwin Baker | – Sanjay Jolly, Victor Pickard |
Legal & Political Theory
| Critiquing Legal Futurism and Imagining a Radical, Emancipatory Legal Liberalism | – Robert Weber |
| Liberal Internationalist Wars, the American War Dead, and What Elites Say About Them | – Cory Isaacs |
| Critical Political Economy Beyond the Production/Circulation Dichotomy | – Ulysse Lojkine |
| Democracy against Proceduralism | – Steven Klein |
| Law, Liberation, and Causal Inference | – Lily Hu |
| Where is the Political Economy? | – Angela P. Harris, Amy Kapczynski, Noah Zatz |
| When the Moral Economy Became a Political Economy | – Emily Erikson |
| What Supply Chains Can Teach Us about Neoliberalism | – Benjamin McKean |
Political Economy of Care
| Democratizing Health Systems to Advance Health Justice | – Alicia Ely Yamin, Tara Boghosian |
| Democratizing Governance to Advance Health Justice and Economic Democracy | – Ben Palmquist |
| How to Vaccinate the World, Part 1 | – Amy Kapczynski |
| How to Vaccinate the World, Part 2 | – Amy Kapczynski, Jishian Ravinthiran |
| Excerpt: How to Vaccinate the World | – David Kessler, Fatima Hassan, James Krellenstein, Zain Rizvi |
Tech
| Data Governance for a Society of Equals | – Salomé Viljoen |
| A General Defense of Information Fiduciaries | – Andrew Tuch |
Transnational LPE
| Jumping Turnstiles: The Constitutional Convention in Chile | – Claire Debucquois |
| Towards a Law and Political Economy Approach to the Global War on Terror | – Zohra Ahmed |
| The European Green Deal: A Transformative Mirage? | – Ivana Isailović |
Legal Strategies
| On Using Private Law to Shut Down Private Prisons | – Sonya Levitova |
| TransUnion Is a Double-Edged Sword: Should the Legal Left Wield It? | – Christopher Morten |
Interviews
| Politics in, of, and through the Legal Academy: Akbar Interviews Matsuda, Part 1 | – Amna Akbar, Mari Matsuda |
| Politics in, of, and through the Legal Academy: Akbar Interviews Matsuda, Part 2 | – Amna Akbar, Mari Matsuda |
| Legal Education for the Climate Crisis: An Interview with Abby Reyes | – Angela P. Harris, Abigail Reyes, Caroline Parker |
| Producing Subjects: Rethinking Productivity, Subjectivity, and Value Part 1 | – Susan Dianne Brophy, Anastasia Tataryn |
| Producing Subjects: Rethinking Productivity, Subjectivity, and Value Part 2 | – Susan Dianne Brophy, Anastasia Tataryn |
| Interlocking Crises: Q&A on Global Debt in a Post-COVID World with Odette Lienau, Part 1 | – Odette Lienau |
| Interlocking Crises: Q&A on Global Debt in a Post-COVID World with Odette Lienau, Part 1 | – Odette Lienau |
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Saving the best for last, we also wrote about ourselves: in addition to announcing a few mid-season trades, we traveled back in time to listen to the hits of yesteryear, while Sam & Caroline introduced a new class of law students to the wild world of LPE.
| Transition Day | – Luke Herrine |
| The 10 Most Read Posts of 2017-2018 | – Editors |
| The 10 Most Read Posts of 2019 | – Editors |
| The 10 Most Read Posts of 2020 | – Editors |
| 10 Hidden Gems from the Archives | – Editors |
| Law and Political Economy: A (Very) Brief Field Guide for 1Ls | – Sam Aber, Caroline Parker |
| LPE Field Guide: A Brief Reading List | – Sam Aber, Caroline Parker |
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Tune back in tomorrow and Friday, when the editorial staff will highlight some of our favorites!
