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LPE Originals

In Defense of Theoretical Quietism

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Sam Moyn has recently challenged what he sees as the “theoretical quietism” of LPE. Yet this resistance to high-altitude legal and social theory is entirely justified. The most productive theorizing, which involves contesting and clarifying the mid-level legal and economic concepts that have the most effect in the world, will occur a step below these abstract heights. It is here that LPE scholars should continue to focus their attention.
LPE Originals

Cruel, But Not Unusual, Market Foundations

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Private equity firms, cloaked under protective securities laws, have increasingly acquired companies that provide goods and services in U.S. jails and prisons. But it is the legal construction of prisoners’ rights that has enabled this market to take the particular form that it has, turning community ties into steady payment streams. In particular, Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, which has affirmed the constitutionality of pay-to-stay fees, has transformed the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment into a (subordinating) right to credit.
LPE Originals

The Latest US Export to Brazil? Legalized Labor Exploitation

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Multinational platform companies, including Uber, iFood, Rappi, and 99, are currently pushing to export the United States’ most exploitative new labor laws to Brazil. Lawmakers should reject these attempts. As empirical evidence from the U.S. context shows, adopting a new “intermediate” worker category would be disastrous for low-income workers, and as Courts around the world have found, platform companies exert high levels of control over their workers and thus should be subject to standard labor and employment regulations.
LPE Originals

What Law Clinics Left Behind

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Though a familiar feature of legal education today, law clinics have a complex history. In the 1960s and 1970s, when student activists demanded curricular reform, law schools embraced clinics as a way to defuse the threat of student power. Looking back at this largely forgotten history helps illuminate the demands that were left behind, and demonstrates the need to reclaim the legacy of more militant student organizing.
LPE Originals

How to Protect Federal Agencies through Collaborative Bargaining

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Collective bargaining agreements offer the chance to proactively build in protections for federal workers that will be vital if a dangerously anti-administrative candidate like Trump or DeSantis takes office. But to take advantage of this opportunity, agency leadership must be conciliatory and collaborative in negotiations.
LPE Originals

The Care Bureaucracy

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In response to an expanding need for at home care, the state has established a highly bureaucratic system for delivering and compensating such assistance. This rigid approach to valuing care, in which needs are fragmented into easily quantifiable units, imposes under-recognized yet significant costs on workers and recipients alike.
LPE Originals

Legal Theory in the Lowercase

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The idea that LPE is lacking in legal theory, as Sam Moyn has recently claimed, depends on what counts as legal theory. If we take Legal Theory to be a subject that is defined by the Marxism-related anxieties of CLS, then LPE work is severely under-theorised. If, instead, we endorse an idea of legal theory without capitalisation – a way of writing about law that is explicit and explanatory about our assumptions – then many LPE scholars have been analytically generous in presenting their understanding of law and political economy, even if more remains to be done.
LPE Originals

Dismantle or Democratize Big Tech?

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With bipartisan calls to break up big tech, it is worth pausing to ask whether the proposed remedy matches the diagnosis of the problem. Antitrust breakups work best when there’s a clear conflict between public and company interests. Yet with some of the most pressing problems – such as the spread of disinformation – company and public interests plausibly converge. An alternative approach would be to keep tech companies intact but integrate users and workers more directly into their governance systems.
LPE Originals

Cemex and the Right to Organize: Three Theories of the Case

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The NLRB’s recent Cemex decision should discourage employers from resisting unionization and therefore make it easier for workers to gain bargaining rights. But how should we understand the basis of this decision? Brishen Rogers considers the case from three theoretical perspectives: the liberal legalist, the progressive functionalist, and the low-key Marxist.
LPE Originals

In Defense of Theoretical Pluralism

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Sam Moyn has recently suggested that the LPE movement should embrace an underlying account of what law does — and by extension, an account of capitalism and the state. But no single theoretical perspective, however self-consistent and well fortified, can match the complexity of our world. If we are to acknowledge this reality without falling into social-theoretic nihilism, we must take seriously the practice of theoretical pluralism.
LPE Originals

RICO and Stop Cop City: The Long War Against the Left

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In the case against the Stop Cop City activists, the state alleges a criminal conspiracy among people who have distributed flyers, coordinated a bail fund, and performed legal observation of protests. These charges are outlandish and represent a terrifying abuse of state power, but they are hardly novel. As the case of Ray Luc Levasseur shows, RICO has a long history of being used as an expansive assault on leftwing radicals.
LPE Originals

How Terrorism Torts Could Challenge Israeli Settler Violence

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Since the early 1990s, the United States has created a scheme of laws allowing private parties to sue individuals, organizations, and foreign countries for acts of terrorism in U.S. courts. While these laws have primarily been used to target and harass Palestinians, the recent spate of violence by Israeli settlers in the West Bank presents a potential if unexpected opportunity: to turn the tables on terrorism torts.

LPE Originals

Why Should Tenant Unions Look to Labor Law?

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With tenant organizing on the rise across the United States, legal scholars have been drawn to the idea that tenant unions, backed by the right legislative framework, could serve a function akin to labor unions. But labor and tenancy serve different functions for capitalism. Housing is a commodity that tenants consume rather than produce, so tenants would be better served by universal protections, such as price controls and possessory rights, than by the right to good faith negotiation.
LPE Originals

Does LPE Need Theory?

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Are we liberals or low-key Marxists? What is our theory of the “capitalism” that we so often attack? And above all, how do we understand the role of law in the making and unmaking of social order? Sam Moyn kicks off a new year at the Blog by asking whether the Law and Political Economy movement needs deeper theoretical foundations than it has so far been willing to articulate.