NB: This is the introduction to a symposium on law and global value chains co-convened with the Institute for Global Law and Policy’s Law and Global Production Working Group. The ideas that form the basis for this Symposium have emerged through an ongoing discussion among critical legal scholars, sociologists, geographers and political economists that began…
This post comes out of the early career workshop ‘Law and Political Economy in Europe’, which took place at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, at the University of Oxford, on the 7th of October 2019. For all the posts this series, click here. At the Oxford Workshop, I explored the relationship between the EU economic governance and labor…
Focusing on universalizing access to better paid work submerges two other longstanding elements of critical feminist analysis of care work. These are particularly pertinent to LPE conversations about the political-economic centrality of markets. First, feminist accounts of social reproduction have long highlighted the extensive, essential, but systematically devalued or outright ignored work performed outside conventional labor markets in families and communities. This includes especially direct care work and housework or other household production, but also broader forms of civic participation often denoted “volunteering.” Second, attaching economic resources to nonmarket social reproductive labor starts to loosen paid work’s iron grip on household income more generally. That grip creates a legitimated dependency on labor markets that undergirds power relations both between labor and capital and, within families, between market “breadwinners” and those more conventionally labelled “dependents.” Valuing care thus could facilitate both reimagining work and decentering markets.
This post is part of a series on Care Work. Read the rest of the series here. ** ** ** Caregiving has long been shunted aside and undervalued in the United States. Long-term care (LTC) is no exception. Sometimes called “long term services and supports,” LTC is the help that over 40 million Americans who are sick or…
This post is part of a series on Care Work. Read the rest of the series here. Grassroots migrant worker activists, particularly those working as domestic workers or care workers, have characterized their labor experiences as “servitude,” “modern-day slavery,” and “bondage.” They use these terms to describe both their workplace conditions and the power dynamics…
Click here to read all posts in our Care Work series. “Domestic workers arrive to smoke, ash,” the headline in the Los Angeles Times read on October 29, 2019. Unaware of mandatory evacuations from a fire sweeping through exclusive enclaves near the Getty Museum, domestic workers had trudged up deserted streets and through particle-filled air…
This is the first post in our series on Care Work. Click here to read all posts in the series. Domestic workers are essential to our economy and society. They are the nannies that take care of children, the house cleaners that maintain homes, and the care workers that allow aging loved ones to live…
This post comes out of the early career workshop ‘Law and Political Economy in Europe’, which took place at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, at the University of Oxford, on the 7th of October 2019. For all the posts this series, click here. The impending climate crisis, the widespread social tensions and the burgeoning level of wealth and…
The following set of posts comes out of the early career workshop ‘Law and Political Economy in Europe’, which took place at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, at the University of Oxford, on the 7th of October 2019. For all the posts this series, click here. The normative vision of Law and Political Economy (LPE)…
This post continues our series featuring efforts to organize LPE student groups at several law schools. You can read the rest of the posts here. Why do people who believe in a more just, egalitarian society go to law school? Some of us hope to learn how the law can be used to disrupt the status…
This post continues our series featuring efforts to organize LPE student groups at several law schools. You can read the rest of the posts here. Berkeley holds a unique place in the public imagination as the home of the Free Speech Movement and the People’s Park protests, as Earl Warren’s alma mater, and as a reliable…
This post continues our series featuring efforts to organize LPE student groups at several law schools. You can read the rest of the posts here. Our introduction to Law & Political Economy came during the February 2019 Rebellious Lawyering Conference (“RebLaw”) at Yale Law School. The Miami Law chapter of the National Lawyers Guild sent six…
Over the past year, student organizing has become an important part of the Law and Political Economy Project. This week we’re highlighting the work of several LPE student chapters. We hope that by amplifying their work, we can reach more students at more law schools.
This post is part of our symposium on Medicare for All. You can find all the posts in the series here. *** Medicare for All has the potential to address gaps in access to quality long-term care services for the elderly by mitigating some of the inequities in the market for long-term care. It could do…
Environmental law has never felt so undemocratic. On nearly every aspect of environmental protection, the federal government is disconnected from the desires of its citizens. The best most citizens can hope for is that a still-distant election will produce a friendlier administration, one that will manage to embrace our priorities despite the immense influence of industry. There’s an irony beneath that sense of powerlessness, one that reveals a tragic flaw in modern environmental law. I want to both explore that flaw and introduce a tool from environmental law’s past that might help fix it. It’s a tool that entrusts ordinary people to decide: the jury.
