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LPE Originals

How Environmental Law Created a World Awash in Toxic Chemicals

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Of the estimated 350,000 chemicals now on the global market, only a handful have been properly tested. And as the looming crises with forever chemicals and micro-plastics make clear, we are only just beginning to grasp the enormous toll that these novel entities are taking on human health. How did our environmental law allow this to happen? And what can be done to correct it?
LPE Originals

Labor’s Constitutional Vision in the Face of Capital’s Attack

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Presented with a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, corporations and right-wing trade associations have launched a series of constitutional challenges to worker rights. In response, workers are putting forward a fundamentally different vision for our economy and society — an alternative not only to business’s right-wing constitution but also to the New Deal constitutional settlement.
LPE Originals

Can Subsidies Discipline Capital?

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The Biden Administration’s recent foray into industrial policy relies heavily on voluntary inducements to push firms to invest in renewable energy technology and domestic manufacturing. Some observers argue that this approach, commonly known as “derisking,” will yield paltry results: firms will pursue the same priorities they would have absent the legislation, just with a better financial return. Yet subsidies do not only alleviate risk; they also impose a new risk of falling behind competitors, and so mold the landscape of profitability into a disciplinary force itself.
LPE Originals

Financial War and Economic Peace in Israel-Palestine

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The United States has long used economic coercion in hopes of achieving “economic peace” in Israel/Palestine. Yet its vision of this peace has notably shifted over time. While earlier sanctions punished those who disrupted the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” or undermined neoliberal dreams of global commercial integration, Biden’s recent sanctions against West Bank settlers aim primarily to secure a peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, relegating Palestinians to observer status.
LPE Originals

Imperialism’s Shell Game

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While every possible form of pressure should be brought to bear on the Biden administration to cut off the flow of arms to Israel, the prevailing law and policy debate tends to obscure some key aspects of how U.S. imperialism actually works. For the United States does not simply ship arms abroad, it is also the world’s leading arms trafficker, wielding enormous power over how weapons made by other countries circulate throughout the world as an immense collection of commodities.
LPE Originals

How Nonprofit Hospitals Deny Financial Assistance to Patients

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Nonprofit hospitals frequently deploy administrative hurdles to prevent low-income patients from receiving legally-mandated financial assistance. As a result, patients who should have qualified for assistance instead have billions of dollars of debt placed on their credit reports or sold to aggressive collectors. The IRS could mitigate this cruel practice by clarifying that hospitals are required to proactively screen patients for eligibility before issuing any bill.
LPE Originals

Social Media, Authoritarianism, and the World As It Is

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Disagreement over recent TikTok legislation reveals a deep divide about our current political moment. Should we, like many of the bill’s proponents, assume the existence of a functional, liberal state whose machinery tends toward justice? Or do recent illiberal trends give us reason to reject this assumption? Before we move to further concentrate global surveillance and propaganda power in the hands of the United States, we should be clear-eyed about the threats to speech and privacy that emanate from within.
LPE Originals

Recovering the Left-Wing Free Trade Tradition

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Since the late 20th century, free trade has been defended primarily by neoliberals who cared little about social justice or democracy. However, a longer examination of free trade’s relationship to left-wing politics paints a very different picture. Recovering the history of those who defended free trade from the left may help us envision an alternative to the escalating economic nationalism we see today.
LPE Originals

The Unavoidable Consequences of Being Human

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Next month, the Supreme Court will decide whether it is constitutional for cities to punish unsheltered people for sleeping outside, even when the city fails to provide any safe alternative. Yet, no matter how the court rules, homeless people will still face significant threats from cities.
LPE Originals

The Necropolitics of Milei’s Labor Governance

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Javier Milei’s labor policies in Argentina highlight two often overlooked features of contemporary capitalism: the emergence of new labor subjects and the role of violence in processes of labor precarization. This production of precarity serves as a mechanism for framing certain lives as disposable and bolsters illegal economies that are increasingly replacing the welfare state’s promise of social inclusion.

LPE Originals

A Netchoice Win Would Be a Loss for Democracy

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A ruling that tech companies don’t have to comply with neutral regulations would not just block two sloppy laws, it would put a block on politics itself. This is a moment for the Court to stand back and allow democracy to work its clumsy, painful magic.