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LPE Originals

Lawyering and Political Economy: The Clinical Wing of LPE

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What does an LPE perspective imply for the practice of law? In other words, what is the “clinical wing” of LPE? My recently published essay, “Securing Public Interest Law’s Commitment to Left Politics,” seeks to denaturalize and politicize “public interest law,” arguing for a public interest law focused chiefly on building left political power by…
LPE Originals

Racism is at the Heart of the Platform Economy

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This post argues that race and racism are segmenting the new “on demand” labor markets, in ways that facilitate the transition to this new sector of the economy.  Scholars of racial capitalism have argued that modern capitalism could never have gotten off the ground without the violence of slave labor in the cotton economy. Violent…
LPE Originals

Anti-State Statism and Slumlord Capitalism

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Ruth Wilson Gilmore has written that “we are faced with the ascendance of anti-state state actors: people and parties who gain state power by denouncing state power.” This tendency surfaced in the wake of the economic and legitimacy crisis of liberal capitalism in the 1970s, and has gained strength in the decades since, taking hold…
LPE Originals

Toward a Law and Political Economy of Gender Violence

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What does political economy have to do with the issue of gender violence that roiled Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation?  One answer is that law should not separate economics from the social inequalities that mediate power.  Violent enforcement of social hierarchies has long been a core capitalist strategy for securing selective economic advantage, as Angela Harris…
LPE Originals

A Torts Course for the Actually Existing World

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The torts classroom is like a dystopian historical fantasy. Or maybe a kind of morbid historical science fiction. Students and teachers gather to rehearse time-honored rituals around the Great Cases of human tragedy: Scott v. Shephard, Brown v. Kendall, Rylands v. Fletcher, Vosburg v. Putney, Leroy Fibre v. Chicago, Milwaukee, & St. Paul Railway, MacPherson…
LPE Originals

American Tort Law Tells Us How It Really Feels About Law and Economics

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Funny thing about the intersection of tort and law and economics. For decades this school of thought has been ascendant in scholarship and intellectual understandings of this field, as it has throughout private law generally. No one can teach or write competently about torts without giving thought to law and economics fundamentals like cost-benefit analysis,…
LPE Originals

Torts: A Law and Political Economy CounterSyllabus

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This syllabus is, in conjunction with the framing post on the Law & Political Economy Blog, a starting point for understanding the law and political economy approach to torts. The initial readings introduce both the law and economics perspective and the competing law and political economy perspective on tort. Subsequent portions of the syllabus use…
LPE Originals

“Hey Google, What’s a Strike?”

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Yesterday morning, tens of thousands of Google employees walked off the job in Dublin, London, Singapore, Zurich, Haifa, Berlin, New York, Ann Arbor, and many other cities. The immediate spark for the protests was revelations that the company had given generous exit packages to a few executives credibly accused of sexual misconduct, including one accused…
LPE Originals

Raze and Rebuild the Property Course

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“Certainly if we view the common law on the eve of reform, we see the spirit of Heath Robinson at his most extravagant. … It is a real question why nobody before Bentham was provoked, and a part of the answer is that nobody before Blackstone described the system as a whole.” S.F.C. Milson, Historical…
LPE Originals

The Property Course as Critique

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I wasn’t at all sure what to do after I was first asked to teach 1L Property Law. Not only was it an unexpected addition to my courseload, my background was in legal history and critical theory on the one side and in international law on the other, and the idea of picking up a…
LPE Originals

Zoning and Race, from Ladue to Ferguson

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When James Grimmelmann, Jeremy Sheff, Mike Grynberg, Steve Clowney and I decided to write an open source property casebook that could be shared freely with students, one of the benefits was the ability to teach the material in ways that made sense to us. The mortgage chapter, for example, is actually the “foreclosure” chapter: it…
LPE Originals

The State as the Foundation of Property

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A few years ago, I set out somewhat deliberately to publically out myself as being at the far left extreme when it comes to property law scholarship. I attacked progressive property scholarship from the left and attacked information theorists as rationalizing the status quo. So perhaps it is surprising that my 1L Property class is…