Labor, Social Control, and Counterpower
Spring 2023
LPE at HLS and the LPE Project are pleased to announce the conference, Law and Political Economy: Labor, Social Control, and Counterpower. The event will take place from March 31 to April 2, 2023 at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
This year’s conference focuses on two critical areas of LPE scholarship and practice:
- Law, Labor, and Class Power, which encompasses work on labor and employment, as well as examining law, class, and its interactions with race, gender, and other dimensions of subordination; and
- The Political Economy of Social Control, which engages questions related to carcerality, social welfare, and the imposition of social order and subordination in capitalist societies.
Conference events will be held in-person and will also be livestreamed. Following the conference, session recordings will be posted online. The conference is free to attend, but registration is required for in-person attendance.
LPE at HLS and the LPE Project are pleased to announce the conference, Law and Political Economy: Labor, Social Control, and Counterpower. The event will take place from March 31 to April 2, 2023 at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This year’s conference focuses on two critical areas of LPE scholarship and practice: Conference events will be held in-person and…
LPE at HLS and the LPE Project are pleased to announce the conference, Law and Political Economy: Labor, Social Control, and Counterpower. The event will take place from March 31 to April 2, 2023 at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
This year’s conference focuses on two critical areas of LPE scholarship and practice:
- Law, Labor, and Class Power, which encompasses work on labor and employment, as well as examining law, class, and its interactions with race, gender, and other dimensions of subordination; and
- The Political Economy of Social Control, which engages questions related to carcerality, social welfare, and the imposition of social order and subordination in capitalist societies.
Conference events will be held in-person and will also be livestreamed. Following the conference, session recordings will be posted online. The conference is free to attend, but registration is required for in-person attendance.
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We are in an era of renewed labor ferment, with dramatically rising interest in labor organizing alongside deficient legislative frameworks and a hostile judiciary. What can historical perspectives on labor movement strategies teach us about the potential and limits of organized labor power today? The panelists’ scholarly projects examine what lessons today’s labor activists might draw from the successes and failures of union, civil liberties, and civil rights lawyers in the mid-twentieth century.
Moderator:
Matthew Bodie (University of Minnesota Law School)
Moderator:
Luke Herrine (University of Alabama School of Law)
Moderator:
Aaron Benanav (Syracuse University)
Moderator:
Andrew Crespo (Harvard Law School)
Moderator:
Hiba Hafiz (Boston College Law School)
What are the contours of self-determination at a global scale? In this panel, leading critical legal scholars will examine the dynamics of social control and empire in the overlapping contexts of militarism, debt relations, and climate crisis. Surveying their fields, the panelists will discuss the role of law in international political economy and suggest areas for urgent intervention in the transnational legal order.
Moderator:
Felipe Ford Cole (Boston College Law School)
This panel puts law and political economy perspectives on the labor movement in direct conversation with the on-the-ground efforts of organizers, practitioners, and journalists. Panelists will discuss their experiences in the labor movement, how their work interacts with the legal system, the challenges they confront, and the strategies on which they rely.
Moderator:
Diana Reddy (Berkeley Law)
How are people organizing to dismantle carceral structures, logics, and practices that pervade their communities? This panel will feature organizers, practitioners, and journalists on the frontlines who will highlight how communities are strategically mobilizing against the carceral state, with a focus on public schools and the child welfare system.
Moderator:
Amna Akbar (Ohio State University Moritz College of Law)
What characterizes the production and articulation of race, gender, and class in capitalism? What role do law and legal theory play? The papers in this panel address the legal infrastructure that sustains low-wage work under racial capitalism, social movement strategies challenging the immiseration of workers, and the role of lawyers in social movements; the need for LPE to engage the moral politics of productivity and the background legal structures that reward extraction of human value; and offer a new approach to class analysis designed to explain the dynamics of capitalism and the integral role of a racialized underclass and gender subordination in its history and structure.
Moderator:
Guy-Uriel Charles (Harvard Law School)
This panel will examine how our conceptions of constitutionalism, the courts, and legal authority facilitate or hinder shifts to more democratic modes of self-government. Panelists will trace the historical roots of our contemporary “juristocracy” and suggest interventions that reimagine the relationships between legal institutions, constitutional theory, and popular sovereignty.
Moderator:
K-Sue Park (Georgetown Law School)
This panel will examine how legal regimes regulate gender in contemporary capitalism. These regimes are varied and extensive, including public health infrastructures, insurance markets, and surveillance technologies. In both ideological and material terms, panelists will discuss how these systems construct gender relations, relations of care, and patterns of social reproduction.
Moderator:
Amy Kapczynski (Yale Law School)
Moderator:
Daniel Farbman (Boston College Law School)