Companies and their investors extract large amounts of wealth from people’s data. Yet because tax law treats users of digital platforms as consumers, rather than producers, neither these users nor their home countries receive any compensation in return. How might international tax law be used to mitigate the harms of this exploitative arrangement?
In a society as deeply divided as our own, it is fanciful to think that we will be able to deliberate our way to a consensus. To resolve the longstanding puzzle of the administrative state’s democratic legitimacy, we need to resist the neoliberal impulse to erase politics and, instead, design opportunities for genuine contestation.
If one spends too much time around mainstream economists, one might be inclined to think the whole idea of a state enforcing norms of fair price is either redundant or perverse. But we know better than that.
Hot dogs are not sandwiches, work meetings are not retreats, and shareholders are not investors. Yet only one of these conceptual mistakes illicitly lends support to the idea that all corporate activity should benefit shareholders.
Jobs have come roaring back since the big losses of 2020, GDP has grown at its fastest annual rate in nearly four decades, and family balance sheets have become much stronger. Why, then, are Americans so unhappy about the economy?
Can LPE offer a distinctive perspective on digital mass surveillance by the police? Or does it have nothing to add to the more general civil-libertarian and civil-rights-based objections to new forms of police surveillance as potentially oppressive and often discriminatory?
This essay examines LAPD’s use of “reform” strategies to co-opt criticism and expand data-driven policing, with a focus on the role of lawyers and legal academics.
The public square is too often a place of surveillance, violence, hate, and subordination, with members of historically marginalized groups bearing the brunt of these harms. Privacy rights enable marginalized communities to enrich the public sphere while protecting themselves from violence and subordination.
The annual ranking of the world’s richest highlights the often dramatic shifts, upwards and downwards, in the net wealth of elites. What do these fluctuations tell us about the nature of the things – the property – these elites own, and about the nature of property in contemporary capitalism?
We live in a condition in which capital drives significant social reforms while also undermining their impact and longevity by leaving destabilizing matters of economic inequality unaddressed. From this perspective, current LGBTQ+ victories are built on a shoddy foundation.
Gerald Torres reflects on the ideas that animated the life of Lani Guinier.
What role do lawyers play in advancing progressive social change? Examining the recent history of labor activism in Los Angeles, Scott Cummings distills some lessons for legal mobilization in contemporary social movements.
Birds of a feather. Ships passing in the night. Sister species. How should we understand the relationship between LPE and the critical legal traditions?
In the United States, the rule of law has always had property rights as its lodestar, with private property serving as the central legal interest that requires protection. Attending to our history reveals the dangers and paradoxical nature of this property-first conception of the rule of law.
If we are to correct the deep-rooted power imbalances within our economic institutions, we need to go to the source — the governance of corporations — and adopt more equitable arrangements. Luckily, there is a solution hiding in plain sight.
