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.
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?
