This past February, hundreds of scholars converged in downtown Richmond for the inaugural Association of Law and Political Economy conference. As interest in the field grows, a larger question looms: can a loose coalition on the academic left turn shared critiques of the status quo into a durable movement?
Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas offers a vision of AI guided by peace, dignity, and moral renewal. It stands in stark contrast to an American administration governing by meme, chaos, and willful self-destruction.
When defending income inequality, high-earners often appeal to an old left-wing idea: that workers are entitled to the fruits of their labor and should be paid the value of their productive contribution. In complex economies, however, the size of any worker’s productive contribution depends on collective labor that the market systematically fails to credit.
As policymakers pursue supply-side reforms to address rising housing costs, they must also confront a legal regime that affords tenants second-class status. Without confronting this anti-tenancy bias, abundance reforms risk producing more housing within the same inequitable framework.
The most pressing AI-driven crisis is the overestimation of AI’s capabilities and impacts, which has produced a historically large speculative AI bubble. To safeguard against this economic catastrophe, policymakers must confront and resist AI industry hype.
What is this thing called capitalism? What, if anything, is the use of legal theory in understanding capitalist society? Is anything gained, or anything lost, if we replace the phrase “Law and Political Economy” with “Legal Theory and Capitalism”? Answers to these questions (and more!) in a hot new double issue of Law & Contemporary Problems.
As we work toward a durable democratic future, a commitment to legislative primacy can serve as an orienting north star. Reaching that goal, however, will require using both legislative and executive tools, especially while we are working with an imperfect, hobbled, and significantly co-opted legislature.
As New York’s Rent Guidelines Board weighs a possible rent freeze, the real significance of its annual hearings lies beyond the final vote. These public proceedings serve as a crucial engine for tenant organizing, building the collective power needed to overcome the real estate industry’s next wave of opposition.
Corporate diversity practices, long celebrated for driving revenue growth and stabilizing stock prices, are now being targeted as liabilities by conservative shareholder activists, consumer boycotts, and litigation. This shift from rainbow capitalism to today’s anti-woke agenda reveals how diversity’s value in the marketplace has always been politically and legally constructed.
What if the price you see isn’t the price, but your price? As personalized pricing and consumer profiling spread, hidden patterns of advantage and disadvantage threaten to undermine the shared conditions that make collective action possible.
Coined by a German economist in 1926, Fordism came to describe the dominant political-economic order of the mid-twentieth century. Could “Muskism” play a similar role in the twenty-first? How should we understand its distinctive regime of accumulation, and what kind of social contract does it propose?
For over a century, fixed prices have made markets more transparent. Surveillance pricing threatens to reverse that progress by allowing corporations to secretly tailor prices using personal data. While states are beginning to respond to these practices, their efforts face growing First Amendment headwinds.
By targeting the addictive design features of social media platforms, K.G.M. v. Meta marks a breakthrough in product liability law. Yet the case also reveals a neglected class dimension: the harms of addictive platform design fall most heavily on those with the fewest alternatives. In addition to regulating these harmful products, we must build a world in which children do not so desperately need them.
At the core of the U.S. banking system is the public’s choice to delegate money-creation privileges to private actors. But what is the public getting in exchange? An ever-swelling suite of predatory credit products and few basic services. It’s time to reset the terms of the bargain.
While student loan repayment has resumed, stability is an illusion. Beneath the surface, mounting delinquency, administrative chaos, and the potential dismantling of federal loan management point to a deeper crisis in the governance of higher education finance.
