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.
The conventional interpretation of American antitrust law has neglected its democratic and egalitarian origins. As the Sherman Act’s legislative history makes evident, its primary target was the concentration of economic power, rather than coordination among workers, farmers, and other smaller producers.
The LPE Blog asks Amy Kapczynski, Aziz Rana, and Robert Tsai how we might fix the Constitution.
Recent attacks on CRT often claim that the US, since its founding, has been committed to principles of liberty and equality. This strategic use of American universalism, along with an explicit focus on public education, has a long history in rightwing politics: for the better part of a century, it has been perhaps the dominant way of articulating white resistance to racial reform.
Recent attacks on CRT must be understood as part of a long-term battle to privatize education. For economic conservatives, a “free market” has the capacity to satisfy all “tastes” in racial education.
When public education is seen as a property entitlement, there is an inevitable contestation over who controls this valuable resource and to what end.
Powerful monopolies have captured our core communication infrastructures, subjected them to the unbridled pursuit of advertising revenues, and generated profound social harms. Media democracy, as a political and intellectual project, seeks to provide solid theoretical foundations from which to understand and respond to this worsening crisis.
To ensure support for its Global War on Terror, the United States has exploited the Pakistani government’s reliance on foreign credit to guarantee cooperation in US counterinsurgency operations. In leveraging its role as a lender to provide Pakistan with short-term financial relief, the United States has deepened Pakistan’s economic dependency, undermined the nation’s chance for a more equal domestic political and economic arrangement, and consolidated the power of its domestic military elite.
