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LPE Originals

What is the Point of Overtime Laws?

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When Congress eliminated taxes on overtime last summer, it framed the move as a win for workers. However, by encouraging people to spend more time on the job, the policy runs directly counter to the original purpose of overtime laws: to protect workers’ personal time and give them greater control over their lives. A better agenda would involve shortening the workweek, increasing the overtime premium, and banning mandatory overtime.
LPE Originals

Martin Shkreli Had a Point

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A decade ago, Martin Shkreli became the most hated man in America by raising the price of Daraprim – an antiparasitic essential for immunocompromised patients – from $17.50 to $750 per pill. Though Shkreli’s conduct was lambasted in the court of public opinion, the legal framework that allowed this 4,000 percent increase remains in place. And Daraprim? It still costs $750 a pill.
LPE Originals

Writing a History of Marital Privilege in an Age of Retrenchment

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As the government seeks to erase the past injustices and achievements of marginalized groups, it is worth recalling how those gains were made. Parents, partners, students, and lawyers pursued a more just future at significant personal and institutional risk. Their courage offers a lesson for the present. At stake is whether this moment marks a temporary break in the long arc toward justice, or the beginning of a far grimmer chapter.
LPE Originals

Big Pharma’s Get-Out-of-U.S.-Tax-Free Card

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While many industries excel at not paying U.S. corporate taxes, the pharmaceutical industry takes the cake – despite $400 billion in prescription drug sales in 2022, Big Pharma claimed to have close to zero taxable income. One of their principal methods for maintaining this charade is the constant threat of exit, moving their headquarters abroad to avoid U.S. taxes altogether. In order to collect more much needed tax revenue from corporations, policymakers must first constrain Big Pharma’s ability to simply abandon ship.
LPE Originals

The Means-Testing Industrial Complex

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As Republicans tightened work requirements and eligibility rules for Medicaid and SNAP last year, Equifax’s CEO openly celebrated the profits to be made from administering this deprivation. Means-testing and administrative complexity have turned America’s safety net into a lucrative revenue stream for monopolistic private contractors, underscoring the need for public data infrastructure and simpler eligibility rules.
LPE Originals

Immigration Agencies Are Openly Defying Federal Courts

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Federal courts have overwhelmingly rejected the Trump Administration’s radical expansion of mandatory detention. Despite this, ICE continues to arrest and detain tens of thousands of people each month, effectively nullifying judicial oversight through sheer scale.
LPE Originals

Beginning with Empire

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U.S. attacks on alleged drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean have been widely condemned for violating international law. Yet much of this criticism, by focusing narrowly on the Trump administration’s military excesses, risks repeating a familiar mistake: debating how the United States wages war while leaving unquestioned why it wages it at all.
LPE Originals

The Dark Doppelganger of Affordable Higher Education

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In the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, the Trump administration included a brilliant bit of faux-populism: a five-year tuition freeze. The proposal creates the illusion that the right is taking decisive action to address affordability, while obfuscating its larger plan to abandon higher education as a public good. To prevent MAGA from outflanking and corrupting a popular left position, we must embrace ambitious solutions that will actually address the high cost of attending college.
LPE Originals

LPE Without Borders: Lessons from the Global South

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Law and political economy scholarship, immersed in a particular history of Northern law and capitalism, has tended to focus on US law and policy, with occasional excursions into Europe. But in a world where imperialist ideas and technologies tend to circle back to the metropole, and where the periphery appears to be the future of the center, the Global South has much to teach LPE about law, capitalism, and development.