Skip to content
LPE Originals

Is This the End of Corporate Capitalism?

By

Though dominant features of the American economy for most of the 20th century, corporations have become less numerous in the past three decades. Meanwhile, neglected alternatives to the public corporation have proven surprisingly durable. Given the manifest pathologies of shareholder capitalism, the combination of these two trends may suggest pathways out of our current dilemma.
LPE Originals

Surveillance Wages: A Taxonomy

By

Algorithmic wage discrimination – paying workers personalized wages using opaque and fluctuating formulas – is common in the gig economy. But with the recent development of intrusive new forms of employee surveillance, such wage-setting practices will be coming soon to a workplace near you. This post offers a brief taxonomy of five different forms of algorithmic wage differentiation, each of which is already visible in the gig work economy, and explains how the spread of these management techniques threatens workers’ well-being and political freedom.
LPE Originals

How Not to Regulate Digital Platforms

By

In Paul Gowder’s recent blog post, as well as in his new book, he argues that we should democratize, rather than dismantle or restructure, Big Tech platforms. However, this familiar framing obscures more than it reveals, relying upon an impoverished account of the political economy of technology, of the co-evolution of politics and production, and of the core role of material infrastructure in digital settings.
LPE Originals

Economic Coercion in a Multipolar World

By

Once the near-exclusive prerogative of the United States, unilateral economic sanctions are increasingly a multipolar phenomenon. As Aslı Bâli has recently argued, this current conjuncture may offer a new window to resist forms of economic coercion that legitimate and enforce an unjust neocolonial global order. At the same time, however, there are new dangers inherent in the transformation of sanctions and related coercive practices into tools of open hegemonic contestation.
LPE Originals

Climate Change and the Neoliberal Imagination

By

Neoliberal welfare economics has constrained our moral and political imagination and, in so doing, limited our ability to realistically advance climate justice. This can be seen by considering two policy proposals that appear to fit comfortably within the standard climate economic paradigm, but that offer a wider scope of possibility than conventionally allowed.
LPE Originals

Who Cares About Efficiency?

By

Efficiency is a slippery term, and legal scholars frequently shift between distinct and even incompatible meanings as is convenient. This lack of clarity can inhibit students from challenging certain claims. To ask “but what do you mean by ‘efficiency’?” can make one appear unsophisticated or pedantic. But that’s precisely the question we should be asking. Because there are good reasons to reject the notions of “efficiency” usually taught in 1L classes, even if — in fact, precisely because — we have good reason to value other forms of efficiency.
LPE Originals

Towards a Legal Understanding of Social Data

By ,

There is, at present, a conceptual mismatch between the strategies of accumulation that are dominant in the digital economy and the basic assumptions that underlie the legal regimes tasked with regulating accumulation. To begin to address this discrepancy, legal actors in these regimes need a better understanding of how companies translate social data into profits and power.
LPE Originals

The Treatise That Has Misled Antitrust Lawyers for Decades

By ,

Stephen Breyer called it more valuable than circuit court precedents and Supreme Court Justices. Yet the Areeda-Hovenkamp treatise on antitrust law adopts misleading legal interpretations that systematically favor corporate power in at least two key areas: thresholds for exclusive-dealing foreclosure and the efficiencies defense for mergers. Time for a reappraisal of an antitrust staple.
LPE Originals

In Defense of Theoretical Quietism

By

Sam Moyn has recently challenged what he sees as the “theoretical quietism” of LPE. Yet this resistance to high-altitude legal and social theory is entirely justified. The most productive theorizing, which involves contesting and clarifying the mid-level legal and economic concepts that have the most effect in the world, will occur a step below these abstract heights. It is here that LPE scholars should continue to focus their attention.
LPE Originals

Cruel, But Not Unusual, Market Foundations

By

Private equity firms, cloaked under protective securities laws, have increasingly acquired companies that provide goods and services in U.S. jails and prisons. But it is the legal construction of prisoners’ rights that has enabled this market to take the particular form that it has, turning community ties into steady payment streams. In particular, Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, which has affirmed the constitutionality of pay-to-stay fees, has transformed the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment into a (subordinating) right to credit.
LPE Originals

The Latest US Export to Brazil? Legalized Labor Exploitation

By ,

Multinational platform companies, including Uber, iFood, Rappi, and 99, are currently pushing to export the United States’ most exploitative new labor laws to Brazil. Lawmakers should reject these attempts. As empirical evidence from the U.S. context shows, adopting a new “intermediate” worker category would be disastrous for low-income workers, and as Courts around the world have found, platform companies exert high levels of control over their workers and thus should be subject to standard labor and employment regulations.
LPE Originals

What Law Clinics Left Behind

By

Though a familiar feature of legal education today, law clinics have a complex history. In the 1960s and 1970s, when student activists demanded curricular reform, law schools embraced clinics as a way to defuse the threat of student power. Looking back at this largely forgotten history helps illuminate the demands that were left behind, and demonstrates the need to reclaim the legacy of more militant student organizing.
LPE Originals

How to Protect Federal Agencies through Collaborative Bargaining

By

Collective bargaining agreements offer the chance to proactively build in protections for federal workers that will be vital if a dangerously anti-administrative candidate like Trump or DeSantis takes office. But to take advantage of this opportunity, agency leadership must be conciliatory and collaborative in negotiations.
LPE Originals

The Care Bureaucracy

By

In response to an expanding need for at home care, the state has established a highly bureaucratic system for delivering and compensating such assistance. This rigid approach to valuing care, in which needs are fragmented into easily quantifiable units, imposes under-recognized yet significant costs on workers and recipients alike.
LPE Originals

Legal Theory in the Lowercase

By

The idea that LPE is lacking in legal theory, as Sam Moyn has recently claimed, depends on what counts as legal theory. If we take Legal Theory to be a subject that is defined by the Marxism-related anxieties of CLS, then LPE work is severely under-theorised. If, instead, we endorse an idea of legal theory without capitalisation – a way of writing about law that is explicit and explanatory about our assumptions – then many LPE scholars have been analytically generous in presenting their understanding of law and political economy, even if more remains to be done.