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LPE Originals

Genocide Trade-offs

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While governments in both the west and global south have become increasingly critical of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, these states have nearly all maintained normal trade relations with Israel. How should we understand this mismatch between political rhetoric and economic policy? And where might we look for signs of more material anti-imperial responses on the horizon?
LPE Originals

Why Has the Rule of Law Become So Fragile?

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The rule of law is inherently fragile, as law’s legitimacy ultimately depends on politics. Yet as demonstrated by the successful referendum in Berlin to expropriate more than 250,000 apartments from corporate landlords, this very dependence can empower democratic mobilization and redirect the conservative nature of the law towards a progressive future.
LPE Originals

After Chevron: Political Economy and the Future of the Administrative State

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The Supreme Court’s recent administrative law decisions represent a fundamental shift in both political and economic power. In response, we must not settle for simply restoring the status quo ante. Instead, the task for an LPE approach to the administrative state requires answering a more foundational question: what would effective, equitable, and democratic governance look like?
LPE Originals

Private Financial Markets Are Eating the World

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Over the past decade, private financial markets – the domain of venture capital, private equity, and private credit funds – have grown to the point where they now dominate financial activity. This shift has undermined the protections afforded by existing securities laws and, because pensions are one of the largest contributors to these private funds, has subjected ordinary workers to the opaque, unregulated side of financial markets.
LPE Originals

The Political Economy of Abortion Law in the EU

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In the aftermath of Dobbs, EU institutions and leaders have started to mobilize to defend reproductive freedom. However, the EU’s current approach to abortion access – which regulates it through economic and human rights frameworks – not only contributes to a stratified system of care, but also risks privatizing and depoliticizing the issue.
LPE Originals

Meddling with International Relations

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Boycotts and international sanctions both represent alternative means of lawmaking that challenge the liberal legal order. But while the disruptive potential of boycotts has largely been contained, international sanctions have evaded the constraints of international law. By looking to the social-movement roots of international sanctions, we might be able to imagine an alternative to today’s world of unfettered unilateral economic coercion.
LPE Originals

Weekly Roundup: June 29

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Ntina Tzouvala on Genocide and Political Economy at the ICJ, Chloe Thurston and Emily Zackin on the long history of American debtor politics, and James Kilgore, Emmett Sanders, and Kate Weisburd on the many myths of electronic monitoring. Plus, Amy Kapczynski reviews Mehrsa Baradaran’s new book, Noah Zatz discusses the court order enjoining the UC grad students’ strike, Beatrice-Adler Bolton interviews Maryam Jamshidi about securitizing the university, Beatrice Cherrier launches a ten-part series on discounting, Gali Racabi shares a new open-access work law textbook, a new roundtable at Inquest looks at the role of prosecutors in dismantling mass incarceration, Tony Smith reviews a recent collection on Marxism and the Capitalist State, and the Progressive Talent Pipeline is looking for people to train and recommend for staff roles in Congress and government agencies. Could this be your year?
LPE Originals

Carceral Surveillance and the Dangers of “Better-than-Incarceration” Reasoning

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The most common argument in favor of electronic monitoring in the criminal and immigration systems is that, even with its drawbacks and punitive features, monitoring is better than incarceration. While sometimes appropriate, this rationale is frequently deployed in problematic ways — on the basis of faulty reasoning and to the detriment of those whom it purportedly benefits.
LPE Originals

Can Personal Debt Mobilize Voters?

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While recent conventional wisdom has held that it is futile to organize voters around debt relief, a longer view reveals that there is nothing inevitable about the lack of debtor mobilization. Through the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, debtors repeatedly demanded protection in times of economic distress — a history that contains important lessons for our present moment.
LPE Originals

Genocide and Political Economy: Reconstructing the Relationship

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Traditional interpretations of the Genocide Convention construe the crime of genocide in notoriously limited terms. By contrast, South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ represents an effort to construct a historically-grounded and political economy-informed understanding of genocidal violence.
LPE Originals

When Lawyers Attack the Rule of Law

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While scholars have recently highlighted the role of law in democratic backsliding, they have largely ignored the actors who wield this tool: lawyers. Yet as the guardians of the legal legitimacy upon which autocratic legalism depends, the profession is a critical arena of democratic struggle that merits special attention.
LPE Originals

Workers of the Law Reviews, Unite!

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The uncompensated work that law students perform to run the field’s journals is best understood as part of an economy of prestige: an opportunity to burnish one’s resume in hopes of landing a lucrative or high-status job after graduation. Among other problems with this arrangement, it leaves American legal scholarship vulnerable to repression. Recently, however, journal workers have begun to organize around the conditions of their labor – an effort that has the potential to transform the landscape of legal publication and, in doing so, contribute to a culture of increased solidarity in law schools themselves.
LPE Originals

A Hidden Source of Labor Extraction in Prisons

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Formal and informal associations in prisons are vital providers of food, financial support, physical security, education, news, legal representation, and more. The volume and scope of associations in prisons lay bare the diversity and extremity of needs that the state fails to meet, while also suggesting shortcomings with a patchwork approach by civil society for providing for critical public needs.