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LPE Originals

Executive Action as Power Building: A Response to Professor Doerfler

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Ryan Doerfler has an article over at Jacobin reacting in part to my argument that current law enables the Secretary of Education to cancel as much student debt as she wants by using her enforcement discretion. Professor Doerfler is not so much arguing against my proposal (for which he has some flattering words) as he…
LPE Originals

The Borders of Empire

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The designations “illegal” or “economic” immigrant swiftly mark those to whom they are applied as legitimate targets of national exclusion. Public and academic discourse often treats such immigrants as the consummate political strangers, standing outside the political borders of “we the people” or “we the citizens,” whose status as citizens confers a collectively-held, unilateral right…
LPE Originals

The Second Wave of Algorithmic Accountability

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Over the past decade, algorithmic accountability has become an important concern for social scientists, computer scientists, journalists, and lawyers. Exposés have sparked vibrant debates about algorithmic sentencing. Researchers have exposed tech giants showing women ads for lower-paying jobs, discriminating against the aged, deploying deceptive dark patterns to trick consumers into buying things, and manipulating users toward rabbit holes of extremist…
LPE Originals

The Case for Basic Health

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We seem to be approaching an apotheosis of liberal health care angst, as the irresistible force of the appeal of truly universal health care meets the immovable object of Democrats’ desire to make double-triple-sure not to lose the 2020 election. Replacing our current shambles of a health care system with something much simpler and more…
LPE Originals

When All Social Problems Become Financial Problems

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When it comes to government programs, credit support is often cheaper and less controversial than direct expenditures. Understand this, and you can understand why government officials have an incentive to define all sorts of social problems as financial ones. Government officials face considerable pressure to promote credit markets. Wall Street firms leverage money, expertise and…
LPE Originals

An Environmentalism for LPE: Jed Purdy’s This Land is Our Land

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Law and political economy is on a roll. The Law & Political Economy Project is about to host its inaugural conference. The Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and the Law has launched a journal dedicated to LPE scholarship. LPE student organizations at law schools across the country have sprouted. After two years, this…
LPE Originals

Restricting Women’s Autonomy in the Name of “Eugenics”

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The public/private dichotomy—so fundamental to the liberal political and economic order—produces many (if not all) of our lived contradictions, especially our experiences of inequality along the multiple and intersecting lines of race, sex, gender, class, able-bodiedness, and so on. It should come as no surprise that where the private decision making of women is at…
LPE Originals

The Need for Neodemocracy

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We live in a neoliberal age. For ideological reasons bound up in the epic struggle against totalitarianisms both left and right, a bold experiment in hyper-liberalism took root in the wake of the Cold War. Allowing the democratic achievements and aspirations of liberal and social democracy to atrophy, intellectuals and policymakers began an audacious celebration…
LPE Originals

The Constitutional Role of Economic Coordination Rights

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There’s a common notion that pervades legal and policy debate—including among fairly liberal Democrats—that collective bargaining mechanisms, and even public coordination of markets through minimum wages and working conditions, distort market outcomes and are therefore inefficient (though they may be justified by countervailing considerations). This position immediately sets up a kind of presumption against labor…
LPE Originals

A Law and Political Economy Agenda for Labor and the Constitution

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At the end of September, labor law scholars gathered at a conference focused on “Labor and the Constitution: Past, Present, and Future.”  There, a group of us considered the problem of “Political Economy and the Constitution”—and the extent to which the Law and Political Economy (LPE) analytical frame can be useful in building a more…
LPE Originals

A Political Economy the Constitution Requires

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“Political economy” has an antique ring. More than a century ago, the field of “political economy” began to give way to what was called “economics.” By the mid-twentieth century, political economy was forgotten; economics ruled the roost. But what is old is new again. Political economy is coming back. Economics sidelines the distribution of wealth…
LPE Originals

Teaching Trusts & Estate as Critical Wealth Genealogy

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Step into a Trusts & Estates classroom and you’ll find the first thing most students learn is that the guiding principle in U.S. wealth transfer law is freedom of disposition. As the Restatement (Third) of Property tells us: “The organizing principle of the American law of donative transfers is freedom of disposition. Property owners have…
LPE Originals

Losing at Its Own Game: the Right Retreats from Cost-Benefit Analysis

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Over the past four decades, the right wing has painstakingly built an intellectual scheme to try to justify the weakening of regulatory public health protections on the basis of neoliberal economic theory. But a couple of decades ago, when the EPA began to figure out how—at least sometimes—to beat them at their own game, that…
LPE Originals

Zarda, Just Work, and the Limits of Antidiscrimination Law

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Today, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument on the question of whether Title VII’s prohibition on sex discrimination includes sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination. To provide context to this case, the LPE Blog asked two scholars for contributions that detail the history of sex discrimination protections and address how law should redress gender hierarchies…