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LPE Originals

Law, Metrics, and the Scholarly Economy

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As markets began to usurp other forms of social regulation throughout the 20th century, metrics became increasingly central to the coordination of new spheres of market-mediated relations. More recently, digital metrics have been operationalized to facilitate the platformization of those domains. Platforms use automated scoring systems to rank content and actors across the markets they mediate. Search engines, e-commerce sites, and social media feeds all have ways to rank material and deliver it to users according to their calculation of “relevance.” This post explores metrics and gatekeeper power through the Google Scholar platform and its intermediation of the “scholarly economy”—the domain in which research is produced, consumed, bought and sold.
LPE Originals

Algorithmic Imaginaries: The Political Limits of Legal and Computational Reasoning

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As law and political economy scholars take aim at the deficiencies of dominant modes of legal thought and chart a path for law to promote a more just and egalitarian society, they must also attend to the role of algorithmic systems and algorithmic thought in shaping political imaginations. By the same token, computer and information scientists interested in computation’s role in social reforms would do well to learn from the critiques and proposals of the LPE community.
LPE Originals

Ferment is Abroad: Techlash, Legal Institutions, and the Limits of Lawfulness

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As critiques of the centrality of neoliberal economic logic gain traction, we must take care that such work does not simply clear the path for an emerging hegemony of neoliberal computational logic. Instead, we must be attentive to proponents of the epistemic and political dominance of computational mechanisms, and we must critique them on similar grounds and with similar urgency.
LPE Originals

Liberal Internationalist Wars, the American War Dead, and What Elites Say About Them

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The United States ended the draft in 1973, a year that coincides roughly with the beginning of the wage stagnation that has afflicted lower and middle-income American workers ever since. As inequality ballooned, military service likely became a relatively more appealing option for many. Put another way, rational actors who know their own interests and want to maximize their wealth join the United States Army or Marine Corps to do dangerous jobs during wartime because they have no better options: it is McDonald’s or the military.
LPE Originals

The Law & Political Economy of Disability Accommodations

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The touchstone of contemporary disability law, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, was a victory of the militant disability rights movement, and was drafted with the social model in mind. However, Congress essentially delegated the design for this mandate to the Reagan-era EEOC, which in turn operationalized accommodations through private exchanges between employees and employers. Market logic further limited its redistributive work and society’s ability to critique its effectiveness.
LPE Originals

Law and Organizing for Countervailing Power

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Readers of this blog need no reminder of the pervasive inequalities that define American society. Nor do readers need to be convinced that a perverse concentration of wealth has had profoundly corrosive effects on the viability of American democracy. In a recent article published in the Yale Law Journal, we argue that the traditional approaches to combatting political inequality—campaign finance reform, voting rights, participatory governance—do not go far enough, and we ask what else might be done to redress the fundamental power imbalances that define our politics. We argue that the key lies in building countervailing power among poor and working-class people, and that law can and should be used to facilitate organizing by the poor and working class: not only as workers, but also as tenants, debtors, welfare beneficiaries and others.
LPE Originals

Democratizing Governance to Advance Health Justice and Economic Democracy

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The inequities and exclusions of the U.S. health care system are well known, but the two prevailing strategies in health law and policy—privatization and technocracy—both fail to address disparities in power that produce health injustices. To advance health justice, we need multiple pathways through which everyday people—acting both as individuals and also as member-led associations of patients, families, health care workers, and members of the public—can meaningfully shape governance and advance accountability by contesting over real levers of power. Many possible legal mechanisms incorporate empowered participatory decision-making and accountability into health governance. Here, I explore five mechanisms that hold especially exciting potential.

LPE Originals

The Case for Making Rent Disappear

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To understand what’s at stake in the fight for rent cancellation, we first need to understand the significance of rent. In the US, rent is the vehicle for a wealth transfer from the poorest third of the population to a mere 7% of US residents and a relatively small number of corporate entities. The mom-and-pop landlords that make up that 7% face more precarity than their corporate counterparts, underlining the importance of COVID-19 mortgage cancellation. But many tenants live one paycheck away from homelessness, representing a far greater and more vulnerable segment of the population.
LPE Originals

The Politics of Price Making: Why LPE Needs to Engage with Market Design

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Once we recognize (yet again) that price making cannot be understood in neutral, functionalist terms, efforts to design new markets become impossible to separate from politics and political economy. Viewed in this way, prices are not simply signals or pieces of information that emerge from markets, but also objects of struggle—an insight that one can find in Max Weber’s understanding of markets and prices, in Joan Robinson’s vigorous mid-century critique of mainstream economics, as well as in the work of institutional economists and legal realists, such as John Commons and Robert Lee Hale who viewed prices and price relationships in the context of a broader economy of mutual coercion structured by shifting sets of background entitlements.

LPE Originals

Constitutionalizing Property’s Priority over Farm Worker Organizing: The Threat of Cedar Point

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This year the Supreme Court will hear Cedar Points Nursery v. Hassid, a case out of California which challenges a forty-five-year-old farm labor regulation. The petitioners are alleging that this regulation, which grants farm labor unions a limited right of access to an employer’s property, is unconstitutional on the grounds that it amounts to the government taking their property rights without compensation. This case potentially represents the culmination of a decades-long reactionary campaign against the ability of unions to access an employer’s property. It’s another legal gut-punch to the labor movement and part of a long history of judicial antagonism against workers.