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LPE Originals

The Erosion of Public Control Over Public Utilities

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Since the 1970s, Congress and federal agencies have replaced regulator-established rates with market-derived pricing in many sectors of the U.S. economy. Electricity and natural gas are two such industries. Congress and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) have abolished regulated rates and instituted market-based pricing in a part of the electricity and gas supply chains.…
LPE Originals

Central Banking and Finance—The Franchise View

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It is common to claim that finance is about ‘credit-intermediation,’ a matter of channeling funds from virtuous savers to needful end-users. The picture behind this assertion is that of a gargantuan broker—the financial system as ‘go-between.’ But modern financial systems are much more about credit-generation than intermediation. We need a new metaphor. In our view,…
LPE Originals

The Procedure Fetish

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That’s the title of a new article of mine, slated for publication in the Michigan Law Review. It’s more polemical than most of my work, and it aims to disrupt some of the tidy stories that organize modern administrative law. Although I hope it finds an audience across the political spectrum, its primary target is…
LPE Originals

Contextualizing Contract Law: An LPE 101 Reading List

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Contract is, of course, part of the core legal infrastructure that makes markets possible. But it is more than that. As an ideal type, it is at the core of all individualist social, moral, and political theories that seek to account for human sociality while avoiding social structure. Contract represents the ideal of being able…
LPE Originals

Labor Relationships & and the Legal Vision of 1L Contracts

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Contracts is more than an area of law; it is a key piece of the vision we lawyers bring to many other areas of law. The 1L Contracts course supplies a foundation-stone of the “pre-analytic vision” with which lawyers will eventually think about many other things, including labor relationships. Labor regulation as such is addressed…
LPE Originals

The Green New Deal: What’s Green? What’s New? What’s the Deal?

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During their first weeks in the new U.S. Congress, U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her colleagues already have done something no other American political figure has managed for decades. They have got the whole country, and indeed much of the world, talking about massively transformative public investment as a real prospect. The ‘Green New Deal’ exceeds…
LPE Originals

The Constitution and Democratic Insurgency

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One of today’s most urgent questions is how to combine an analysis of capitalism with an analysis of democracy. The rolling socio-economic crises of the last decade, highlighted by the global financial meltdown, have laid bare the extent to which American society is marked by fundamental and irreconcilable conflicts between those enjoying economic power and…
LPE Originals

Janus in Appalachia

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Many lawyers, scholars and activists on the left agree that the decrepitude of the New Deal framework, along with the Court’s unvarnished neo-Lochnerian constitutional attack on that framework, seem to require an alternative account of the Constitution’s bearings on labor law