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…
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…
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…
Noah Zatz on what a 1L Contracts course might look like from a law and political economy perspective.
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…
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…
In the LPE community, issues of race, class, sexuality, and environment are sometimes referred to collectively as “social and ecological reproduction.” In this post and others to follow, I want to think about the place of the social and the ecological in “law and political economy.” As others have written on this blog, one of…
Let me close this series by briefly sketching two rival visions of constitutional political economy.
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
Is it really a good idea for liberals and the left to be making constitutional arguments against economic inequality?
About a decade ago, when legal employment dipped sharply, there was a raging debate on the future of the legal profession. Some said the drop reflected a permanent decrease in legal work. The logic here was simple: computers were increasingly capable of completing more sophisticated projects. Having eclipsed paralegals in some document review tasks, they…
I teach in a law school where most students and faculty pride themselves on falling somewhere along a spectrum of progressive, extremely progressive, socialist, and left anarchist. Thus, every year, usually within the first month of starting my first-semester property law course, I find myself surprised that the vast majority of my students appear to…
Each year teaching Property Law, I have taught many of the big cases and topics on race and property law, such as M’Intosh and Dred Scott; segregationist turbulence in rights of reasonable access; public accommodations law; racially restrictive covenants; the Fair Housing Act. I never quite had a cohesive idea about this—they each seemed formative.…
I recently interviewed a man in a weakened rural town who makes sausages for a local meat packing business on the 3am shift. He told me about a homeless woman who had come to the meat shop one dark morning with blood-soaked hands. Delirious with cold and exhaustion, she had punched in the glass on…
In my last post, I argued that property law needs to tell new stories, and in doing so, a key benefit would be that we would “uncover” the relationship between property and equality. In this second post, I will turn to another benefit to using narrative as a teaching tool–the ability to “frame” abstract concepts…
