Yesterday, we posted the beginning of Duncan Kennedy’s testimony before the Massachusetts State Legislature’s Joint Committee on Housing. Below is the second half of the testimony. Claim 3: State provision of more section 8 certificates and subsidized affordable projects can resolve the housing crisis. More section 8s and more rent-restricted affordable subsidized units could in…
The Massachusetts State Legislature’s Joint Committee on Housing is currently considering two bills that would revive rent control in the state. The first bill caps rent increases for not-owner-occupied residential housing at the CPI not to exceed 5%, with an income eligibility proviso. The second much more ambitious bill authorizes localities to choose among a…
This post comes out of the early career workshop ‘Law and Political Economy in Europe’, which took place at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, at the University of Oxford, on the 7th of October 2019. Plenty of leftists continue to make the case for limiting migration and enforcing border restrictions. For example, in the UK, union…
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…
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…
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…
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…
This post comes out of the early career workshop ‘Law and Political Economy in Europe’, which took place at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, at the University of Oxford, on the 7th of October 2019. The French corporate law professor Jean-Philippe Robé does not grow tired of reiterating that legal scholars (but also political scientists and…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“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…
