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LPE Originals

Property, Sabotage, and the Origins of Anti-Left Repression

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Between 1917 and 1921, twenty-one states passed criminal syndicalism laws. These laws, which were intended to help eliminate the Industrial Workers of the World, have largely faded from public memory. Looking back, however, we can see a formula for anti-left repression that has proven durable and widely appealing: the limitation of political speech and organizing in the name of property protection.
LPE Originals

Against Legislative Primacy

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On this blog and elsewhere, Congress has recently been cast as a cure for our decrepit democracy. This push for legislative primacy is a mistake: it valorizes a deeply undemocratic institution, relies on a selective reading of the past, and distracts us from vital debates about the policies we should be pursuing and persuading others to support.
LPE Originals

The Dilemma of Picking Winners

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Industrial policy will often require picking winners: if there were already many domestic firms capable of producing the desired output, there would be no compelling reason for subsidy or special treatment. Yet in doing so, the government risks locking in dominant firms and foreclosing the competition it ultimately needs. How might policymakers avoid this trap?
LPE Originals

Affordability Politics Needs a Power Analysis

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A renewed focus on the cost of living crisis is a welcome and potentially unifying frame for the political left. Yet unless we confront the Trump administration’s consolidated economic, cultural, and bureaucratic power, any attempt to deliver an affordability agenda is bound to fail.
LPE Originals

Age and the Lure of Class Reductionism

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Gerontocracy in America has elicited a common refrain from critics: that class, not age, is the real problem. Yet this kind of class reductionism has largely been rejected when it comes to gender and race, and age should be no exception.
LPE Originals

Dispatches from the ALPE Convention Floor

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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?
LPE Originals

You Didn’t Earn That

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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. But does this idea make sense in a complex, interdependent economy?
LPE Originals

Law & Political Economy, or Legal Theory & Capitalism?

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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.
LPE Originals

Taking Legislative Primacy Seriously

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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.