LPE Originals
Co-optation and Counterinsurgency in Surveillance Reform
This essay examines LAPD’s use of “reform” strategies to co-opt criticism and expand data-driven policing, with a focus on the role of lawyers and legal academics.
LPE Originals
Privacy’s Democratic Pushback
The public square is too often a place of surveillance, violence, hate, and subordination, with members of historically marginalized groups bearing the brunt of these harms. Privacy rights enable marginalized communities to enrich the public sphere while protecting themselves from violence and subordination.
LPE Originals
Profiting from the Efforts of Others: Understanding Property-as-Capital
The annual ranking of the world’s richest highlights the often dramatic shifts, upwards and downwards, in the net wealth of elites. What do these fluctuations tell us about the nature of the things – the property – these elites own, and about the nature of property in contemporary capitalism?
LPE Originals
State, Economy, & LGBTQ+ Civil Rights
By
Joanna Wuest
We live in a condition in which capital drives significant social reforms while also undermining their impact and longevity by leaving destabilizing matters of economic inequality unaddressed. From this perspective, current LGBTQ+ victories are built on a shoddy foundation.
LPE Originals
Remembering Lani Guinier
Gerald Torres reflects on the ideas that animated the life of Lani Guinier.
LPE Originals
Lessons for Legal Mobilization
What role do lawyers play in advancing progressive social change? Examining the recent history of labor activism in Los Angeles, Scott Cummings distills some lessons for legal mobilization in contemporary social movements.
LPE Originals
Indeterminacy & Political Economy: A Keywords Teaser
By
Talha Syed
Birds of a feather. Ships passing in the night. Sister species. How should we understand the relationship between LPE and the critical legal traditions?
LPE Originals
The Paradox of Property in the American Rule of Law
By
Paul Gowder
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.
LPE Originals
Codetermination: The Missing Alternative in Corporate Governance
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.
LPE Originals
The Dawn of Antitrust: An Egalitarian Interpretation of the Sherman Act
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.
LPE Originals
New Year, New Amendments
The LPE Blog asks Amy Kapczynski, Aziz Rana, and Robert Tsai how we might fix the Constitution.
LPE Originals
The Long History of Anti-CRT Politics
By
Aziz Rana
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.
LPE Originals
Anti-CRT and a “Free Market” in Racial Education
By
Diana Reddy
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.
LPE Originals
Educational “Ownership” and the Backlash to CRT
When public education is seen as a property entitlement, there is an inevitable contestation over who controls this valuable resource and to what end.
LPE Originals
Towards a Media Democracy Agenda: The Lessons of C. Edwin Baker
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.