Current trademark and antitrust law allows franchisor firms to obtain the low-wage, deskilled labor they desire, without incurring the risks and duties of an employer.
LPE challenges the purportedly self-explanatory relationship between law and “the economy.” This framework is especially productive when turned transnationally.
Workers should have enough representation on corporate boards to influence major decision making. Questions of institutional design should not stand in the way of this common sense reform.
Supply chains, properly understood, are political entities seeking to govern us. Once we appreciate this fact, it becomes easier to see how we might hold this form of corporate power to account.
History shows that the standards by which societies judge economic activity change over time. As these moral frameworks evolve—or devolve—many of the changes make their way into law. For example, modern anti-trust law is grounded in the widely accepted belief that monopolies depress competition and growth and encourage unscrupulous behavior. However, in the sixteenth and…
The logic of the Court’s recent TransUnion decision should make it harder, perhaps impossible, for corporations to enforce various forms of so-called “intellectual property” against competitors and the public. Could and should the legal left wield TransUnion for our own purposes?
As we promised in our post on Monday, below is a list of recommended readings—mostly, but not entirely, from the blog—that helped orient us to the critical and constructive moves of LPE. Our choices are highly partial and subjective, and there is a vast literature on the Blog and elsewhere that can help to orient…
Two 3L LPE fans (and Blog editors) reflect on what LPE has to offer to new law students.
In recent years, unions have experimented with a strategy of “bargaining for the common good”. But, as we have seen with teachers unions and school opening in the pandemic, unions and the general public do not always agree on what the “public good” is. What follows?
In the two decades before the Hepburn Act’s enactment, two entities vied for the right to coordinate the price and distribution of coal. The first—a group known as the Joint Conference of Miners and Operators of the Central Competitive Field—was the child of the United Mine Workers.The second—a group of coal-hauling railroads known as the Seaboard Coal Association—was the child of J. P. Morgan and the Pennsylvania Railroad. Understanding their struggle for power (and why capitalists rather than workers won), can help us better understand the stakes of antitrust.
In my new article, Monopolizing Whiteness, I examine the causes and consequences of “white island districts,” i.e. those that enroll predominantly white and affluent student bodies, despite being in racially and economically diverse metropolitan areas. I theorize that white student segregation in districts like GPSD is a product of (what sociologists refer to as) social closure— a process of subordination whereby an in-group works to curtail an out-group from accessing resources constructed as scarce. I suggest that the “essential facilities” framework of antitrust law can help to illustrate what a legal framework looks like that could appropriately recognize and address the process and harms of social closure.
The history of rural electrification demonstrates why vital public utilities cannot be left to the machinations of the market. To achieve rural rural broadband, we must empower communities to connect themselves in the absence of private capital.
How can we fight for accountability when privatization is designed to allow the government and private contractors to evade just that? A recent lawsuit—and the campaign behind it—points to one underexplored answer.
This post is part of our symposium on The Neoliberal Republic by Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France. Read all posts here. The Neoliberal Republic offers an insightful portrayal of how neoliberalism has permeated France in the past decades. The book helps us to grasp how the legal universe has been deeply implicated in the power…
This post is part of our symposium on The Neoliberal Republic by Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France. Read all posts here. Like many other new shiny things, it ended with disappointment. Emmanuel Macron’s victory in 2017 was hailed as the advent of ‘le nouveau monde’ vis-à-vis the old political elites—a glimmer of hope in the…
