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LPE Originals

Two Fallacies of Democratic Design

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LPE scholars and fellow travelers often call for a more democratic organization of power in our society. However, in specifying what this entails at the level of institutions, proposals commonly rely on two widespread but mistaken assumptions – the idea that more participation is necessarily more democratic, and the idea that democratizing decision-making within firms, political parties, and other mid-level institutions will enhance the quality of democracy in society at large.
LPE Originals

Jackson, Mississippi, and the Contested Boundaries of Self-Governance

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This past year, Jackson has been the site of two separate yet related crises: a failed water system that has left approximately 150,000 residents without access to safe drinking water, and the takeover of the city’s police and court functions by white officials in the state government. Assessed together, these two episodes offer lessons about the challenges of local self-governance in a country awash with material inequality and the importance of pursuing political equality across as well as within jurisdictions.
LPE Originals

Brandeis in Brussels: What American Reformers Can Learn from the European Union

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Neo-Brandeisian and other legal scholars generally associate Brandeis with America’s own anti-monopoly traditions. Yet Brandeis himself drew inspiration from developments unfolding across the Atlantic, and in contrast to Postwar America, where many of his institutional insights were eventually abandoned, the European competition regime has gradually gravitated toward an increasingly Brandeisian approach.
LPE Originals

Toward Prefigurative Lawyering

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Our current moment, filled with peril for all but those with extreme wealth, is one that calls for radical experimentation with utopian institutional and social forms – what are sometimes referred to as “prefigurative” projects. Yet legal education and dominant legal practices tend to constrain the imaginative capacities necessary for such projects. To overcome these constraints, lawyers and law students must learn to engage in shared social analysis with movement partners.
LPE Originals

A Wagner Act for Tenant Unions

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One often overlooked reason for the current rental housing crisis is the imbalance in bargaining power between landlords and tenants. To address this imbalance, Duncan Kennedy, Karl Klare, and Michael Turk argue that we must empower tenant organizing and sketch the architecture of a legislative package that would entitle tenants to organize into unions with specified rights, powers, and protections against retaliation.
LPE Originals

The Origins of the Nonprofit Industrial Complex

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Despite receiving more revenue from the U.S. government than from private donors, the nonprofit sector is often cast as an independent realm that stands apart from both state and market. This picture is not merely misleading, but dangerous, as it naturalizes the idea that the needs of certain citizens are best met by private supplement, rather than by more expansive, more equal government provision.
LPE Originals

Tax Policy for a Climate in Crisis

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How can a Law and Political Economy approach guide the power of taxation toward democracy, justice, and a livable planet? As a start, it can help us understand that tax policy involves not only the power to redistribute market earnings, but also the power to transform market governance.
LPE Originals

Who Is Risk Taking For? Banking in the Shadow of SVB

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Silicon Valley Bank failed, in part, because it parked its cash in long-term U.S. government bonds. But why were Treasuries so attractive in the first place? One reason is that regulators assign the lowest possible risk-weight to U.S. government bonds. This favorable weighting does not, however, reflect a neutral assessment of actuarial risk. Rather, it reflects a policy choice to encourage banks to hold government debt. More broadly, risk-weights have long deviated from assessments of actuarial risks to encourage (or discourage) lending to particular sectors.
LPE Originals

Rewiring Regulatory Review

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Last month, the Biden Administration released a long-awaited overhaul of the regulatory review process. Although these changes are aimed at a highly technical and behind-the-scenes process, their importance is hard to overstate. From lowering the social discount rate, to providing a method for income weighting, to incorporating hard-to-quantify impacts into agency decision-making, these revisions will affect government policymaking across nearly every domain. They also signal overdue recognition that an inclusive political economy requires a transformation not just in the substance of public policy, but also in its process, in the machinery of how policy is designed, analyzed, coordinated, and ultimately made impactful.
LPE Originals

Defendants, United, Could Strike the State Blindsided

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The American penal system is astonishingly vulnerable to the threat of defendant collective action. The reason is simple: the system is massively overleveraged. Major city court systems, which only have the capacity to bring to trial about 3 percent of the cases they handle, are dependent on plea bargaining to remain minimally functional. If even a tiny percentage of defendants banded together and refused to plead guilty, they would bring the administration of criminal justice to a grinding halt. What might such a plea strike look like? And should such a tactic be attempted?

LPE Originals

The High Cost of Cheap Prisons

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Starting in the early 2000s, a bipartisan consensus emerged around the untenable price tag of mass imprisonment. Twenty years later, this left-right consensus has hardly made a dent in the US prison population. Instead, an austerity-driven approach to criminal justice reform has led to reductions in basic services inside prisons and jails, ultimately shifting the cost of such services onto the incarcerated and their families. Interviews with sixty formerly incarcerated New Yorkers, as well as some of their family members, brings to light the true cost of the commercialization of the criminal legal system.
LPE Originals

Can Wage Boards Work in America?

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In recent years, labor activists have tried to summon one of labor’s legendary creatures — the wage board — to aid their cause. Unfortunately, reinvigorating tripartite institutions like wage boards is an uphill battle in the United States, given structural economic forces and institutional arrangements that constrain worker power. But two recent wage board iterations in Seattle and California may stand a fighting chance, both because of the organizational conditions that prevail in these jurisdictions, and because of board structures that provide workers the opportunity to exercise their voice and authority more meaningfully.
LPE Originals

How Free Trade Threatens Global Democracy

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As we debate matters of near-shoring, friend-shoring, and globalization, we must not forget the lessons of the recent past: from Argentina to India, the pursuit of open economies involved a brutal crack down on labor union resistance. In the process, many governments unleashed dynamics that now threaten the survival of democracy itself. Hope, though, can be found in the recent strengthening of labor movements globally, as well as the potential to bolster unions through industrial policy and the transition to a green economy.