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LPE Originals

Legal Geographies of Racism and Capitalism in Keilee Fant v. City of Ferguson, Missouri

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A third vantage point from which to consider Fant v Ferguson is legal geography: the way that racism and capitalism over time shape create and maintain physical spaces through processes of investment and disinvestment, development and underdevelopment, displacement and settlement. A key way into this story – as Audrey MacFarlane notes – is through the history of racial segregation in housing markets.
LPE Originals

Law and Neoliberalism in Keilee Fant v. City of Ferguson, Missouri

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In my first post on Fant v. Ferguson, I introduced the case as a story about our racialized criminal justice system. The criminal justice story, however, represents only one layer of the onion. Like its fast counterpart, the slow violence experienced by Keilee Fant is embedded in a larger system of structural economic inequality that we call “poverty.”
LPE Originals

Criminal Justice and Slow Violence in Keilee Fant v. City of Ferguson, Missouri

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In a series of four posts, I’ll outline an approach to teaching law and political economy using Keilee Fant v. City of Ferguson, Missouri, a class action filed in federal court in the Eastern District of Missouri in 2015. In this first post, I explain how I use the complaint in Fant to frame a discussion of law, political economy, and the “slow violence” of the criminal justice system.
LPE Originals

The Second Republican Revival

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As questions of economic inequality have taken center stage in American politics, there has been a growing interest among public law scholars in questions of power, institutional design, inequality, and political economy. Scholars like Zephyr Teachout, Larry Lessig, Yasmin Dawood, and others have used concepts like domination and corruption to diagnose problems of oligarchy, inequality,…
LPE Originals

How Shareholder Primacy Hurts Jobs and Wages

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The debate around stagnant wages and job creation seems well-settled: scholars point to globalization, or skill-biased technical change, or the decline of union density.  Others point to the ‘rise of the robots’, claiming that automation and technology are driving us towards a jobless future. But few consider that the dominance of shareholder primacy within America’s…
LPE Originals

Colorblindness and Liberal Racial Paternalism in Bailey v. Alabama

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Anyone familiar with Bailey v. Alabama understands that it was a case about racial domination in the Jim Crow South. Lonzo Bailey was a Black agricultural laborer who quit his job with a white farmer. For that, a white legal system convicted him of a crime. The prosecution was characteristic of an effort throughout the…
LPE Originals

Gender Inequality and the Infrastructure of Social Reproduction

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Our jurisprudence of sex equality imagines a world without prescribed gender roles in the family and the public economic and political spheres. Almost fifty years ago, the Supreme Court repudiated the “separate spheres” tradition, which confined women to role of unpaid caregiver in the family and home, while reserving breadwinning and public power to men.…
LPE Originals

Against the Cult of Competition

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Competition is one of the talismanic words in law and economics and American life. It is often hailed as an unqualified good and touted as a solution to what ails society. The value of competition is endorsed across the ideological spectrum: Conservatives decry the lack of competition in schools and taxi cab services, while progressives…
LPE Originals

Economic Human Rights, Not Tough Policy Tradeoffs

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According to conventional law and economics wisdom, problems of economic inequality are best solved with targeted redistributive spending, not universal human economic rights. A political economy perspective suggests the opposite: that legal rights are crucial for economic justice. Orthodox law and economics tellsus: all rights have a cost. Law allocates economic gain, but cannot generate…
LPE Originals

The Real Barriers to Access to Justice: A Labor Market Perspective

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There is a vast literature on access to justice in the United States. In what Sameer Asher has diagnosed as a broadly neoliberal discourse, the legal profession itself stars as the key barrier to access to justice: It is slow to adopt technology, restricts entry with excessive licensure requirements, and bogs down in technicalities. Let’s…
LPE Originals

Free Trade Free for All: Market Romanticism Versus Reality

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The drama surrounding President Trump’s decision to impose import tariffs on steel and aluminum has roiled the Republican Party and wide swathes of the corporate elite. The tariff decision comes on the heels of political bluster about the US being treated “unfairly” by other countries. This accusation of “unfairness” when it comes to US trade…
LPE Originals

Antitrust and the Informal Sector in South Africa

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This is the second post in a two-part series about law and political economy in the South African context. The series reports on a collaboration among leading ‘heterodox’ economists, left-wing sociologists, high level government policymakers, and legal scholars, advocates and activists aimed at “thinking large” about reconstructing the nation’s political economy. *** The way out…
LPE Originals

Visions of Radical Reform in South Africa: Toward a New Constitutional Economy

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This is the first post in a two-part series about law and political economy in the South African context. The second post can be found here. The series reports on a collaboration among leading ‘heterodox’ economists, left-wing sociologists, high level government policymakers, and legal scholars, advocates and activists aimed at “thinking large” about reconstructing the…