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…
This post is part of our symposium on The Neoliberal Republic by Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France. Read all posts here. The Neoliberal Transformation of the State Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France take the reader backstage in The Neoliberal Republic, providing empirically rich insights into how neoliberalism has permeated French state institutions. More specifically, their…
This post is part of our symposium on The Neoliberal Republic by Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France. Read all posts here. Here is a simple story. France, whose economy was largely in state hands, decides to privatize many state-owned enterprises. This move is inspired both by neoliberal theories promoting the superior economic benefits of markets…
This post is part of our symposium on The Neoliberal Republic by Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France. Read all posts here. For most scholars and commentators in France and abroad, the election of Emmanuel Macron as president was met with surprise and dismay. The rapid ascent to the apex of power of a thirty-nine-year-old technocrat…
Embracing the terms “economy” and “political economy,” as LPE has done, risks invoking just the kind of separate, reified realm that we are trying to critique. In our view, defining “the economy,” and studying how legal institutions have done so, should be central issues that LPE scholarship aims to address.
The last few decades have been characterized by the return of market fundamentalism: the belief that society can and should be organized through the institutional mechanism of “self-regulating markets.” Many expected that the 2008 financial crisis might constitute a blow to pervasive market expansion and a check on global dominance of private corporations. Not so.…
Toward a theory of market and firm that rejects the Coasian frame altogether.
If political morality is to inform our analysis of legal institutions, it must account for the way that these institutions construct coalitions and endow them unequally with power. Theories that focus on fairness or political equality do not sufficiently account for these dynamic and iterative aspects of institutions. What is needed is a democratic morality of empowering the disempowered.
Are social media platforms more like common carriers or newspapers? The answer is neither. And that answer has significant implications for how Courts should treat regulation of content moderation.
One of the key theses of Marx’s Capital is the primacy of production over circulation. But there is ample reason to believe this is a false dichotomy: exploitation and surplus value creation happen both in the spheres of production circulation. So where does that leave us?
This weekend, Chileans will elect a Constitutional Convention. This Constitution will finally replace that which Pinochet’s junta put into place, in one of the first victories of neoliberalism. Why is this Convention happening now? And what are its prospects?
The progressive antitrust narrative is based on profoundly flawed analysis of the farm economy. The break ’em up approach may distribute property rights in human and animal misery more evenly, but it does not address the exploitation at the heart of the system.
