How might we come to better understand the complex, multilevel, and interdependent world in which we live? This is a particular challenge for international and global legal scholars whose methods of analysis typically are confined to empirically observable legal phenomena in the form of international conventions, treaties, custom, and the like. In this post, I…
Economists tend to characterize the scope of regulation as a simple matter of expanding or contracting state power. But a political economy perspective emphasizes that social relations abhor a power vacuum. When state authority contracts, private parties fill the gap. That power can feel just as oppressive, and have effects just as pervasive, as garden…
Over the weekend, CVS announced a proposal to acquire Aetna. The $69 billion merger would be the biggest deal ever in the health insurance industry, consolidating in a single entity the role of insurer, pharmacy, and pharmacy benefit manager. There’s good reason to think the deal—if approved by the Justice Department—would harm the public. To…
In their first post on this blog, Amy, David, and Jed assert that “politics and the economy cannot be separated.” Nevertheless, as they also observe, the separation of the two – as, for example, in the idea that economic activity is determined by laws of supply and demand that lie outside the power of governments…
A law-and-political-economy (LPE) approach illuminates environmental law in a few ways. It highlights that environmental law is a prime example of the ways law is generative, even in areas where it is imagined as reactive, and how it channels and responds to contested values even where it is imagined as technocratic. Law does not so…
Back in June, I attended the annual conference of health law professors held by the ASLME. This conference is a real intellectual feast for anyone interested in political economy. National experts describe the latest developments in the Affordable Care Act’s exchange marketplaces. Antitrust scholars consider the proper balance between delivery system integration and competition in…
If forced to choose, I might pick Bailey v. Alabama as my favorite contract law case. That is, if it even counts as one. Which is pretty much my point. Decided in 1911, Bailey is a criminal case – Lonzo Bailey was convicted for fraud. It is also a constitutional case – the Supreme Court…
High drug prices are a major problem in the United States. In the Washington Post today, Aaron Kesselheim and I have an op-ed about what President Trump could do – immediately – to lower drug prices, if he had any intention of following through on all of those campaign promises and tweets. (We also explain…
If the details of the House and Senate tax bills under consideration in Washington make your eyes glaze over, it’s because they’re supposed to. The tax-writers, as they often do, are using the technicalities of the tax law to mask major changes in national economic policy. It’s fairly well-known that both bills are stacked in…
Unionization is, and always has been, the most effective way that working people can wrest a bit of control back from owners like Ricketts. It operates through the simple logic of collective action: by bargaining together, people increase their leverage and gain a voice in shaping what their work lives are like. Unions move workplaces away from institutions governed autocratically – by those with the ‘money that pays for everything’ – and toward institutions that are governed democratically, by including the insights and opinions of those who do the work.
This is not the first time that a similar moment of crisis has helped spur creative new thinking about the relationships between law, capitalism, and democracy—and it won’t be the last. In this post, I want to sketch a particular aspect of this trajectory: the long legacy of legal realism and its relationship to our current debates around law and political economy.
Entrepreneurship and innovation are not good in themselves. The toxic assets at the core of the financial crisis were innovative in many ways, but ultimately posed unacceptable risks. Entrepreneurial arms dealers could easily provide massively destructive weapons to terrorists. Many less troubling products and services have shadow sides that outweigh their ostensible benefits. Until law and economics places such concerns at the core of its inquiry—rather than relegating them to backwater arenas of externality correction and transfers—it will fail to account for core economic dynamics. Law and political economy addresses these issues directly, as an intersecting realm of monetary value and social values.
More than a year after the 2016 election, progressive analysis and strategy continue to be limited by the ping and pong of class-not-race and race-not-class accounts, and recriminations they provoke. Understanding what happened and charting a way forward require an alternative, a thoroughly intersectional analysis of race and class. On such a view, taking race…
In September of 2017, I attended the First International Conference of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Subtitled “Economics for a New Progressive Era,” the conference displaced the university’s annual Post-Keynesian Conference, signaling a growing enthusiasm for MMT among academics, advocates, students, and regular people. Reporters from Bloomberg and the…
Advocates and scholars agree that the labor movement is in dire straits: shrinking union density, fewer successful elections, Trump appointees to the NLRB, and proliferating state free-rider laws all threaten labor’s power. Everyone knows that there’s a problem. The disagreement, however, is in the nature of the problem—and consequently, how to solve it. I submit…
