Federal courts have an important role to play in enforcing laws against powerful figures who defy them. But the options available to federal courts are simultaneously too limited, weak, and dangerous for us to rely on them to the exclusion of everything else.
The final session of our 6-part open course/reading group “What To Do About The Courts,” cohosted with the People’s Parity Project, took place on June 25th at 8pm ET/ 5pm PT, led by Astra Taylor and Sabeel Rahman. TOPIC: The courts have been a galvanizing issue on the Right in recent decades, but not so…
The fifth session of our 6-part open course/reading group “What To Do About The Courts,” cohosted with the People’s Parity Project, took place on May 28th at 8pm ET/ 5pm PT, led by Professor Ryan Doerfler. TOPIC: Several reforms have been proposed to restructure, reform, and/or disempower the courts, each with different stakes and addressing different problems with the…
”Law and Political Economy of Courts” is the third session of the New School’s LPE Night School. It is a conversation between Peter Martin (Center for Community Alternatives), Tarek Z. Ismail (CUNY School of Law), and Jocelyn Simonson (Brooklyn Law School), moderated by Noah Rosenblum (NYU Law School) on the place of courts in creating…
The Law and Political Economy Project and the People’s Parity Project are teaming up to offer an open course/reading group on the urgent question of what to do about the courts in our current political moment. Every day the judiciary plays an increasingly dominant role in shaping our political lives–from recent elimination of reproductive rights and affirmative action, to…
The relationship between the criminal legal system and racial subordination has been well-documented. Much less attention has been paid, however, to racial subordination perpetuated by the civil legal system. In a wide range of cases, including eviction, debt collection, and child support, civil courts routinely extract resources from poor, predominately Black communities, and transfer them to white-controlled corporations or to the state itself. Although some of this occurs through the substance of the law, how the courts interpret and implement the law plays an equally important role.
By studying American courts from a comparative perspective, an important truth emerges: our judiciary is not simply compositionally conservative, at particular moments in history, but structurally conservative, as an institution.
If history is any guide, the long-term solution when the courts are aligned against liberal and progressive causes is not to “reform” the politics out of the courts, but, rather, to confront the courts through politics itself.
If CLS was right to point out that law is a form of politics, why does the separation between law and politics exist and persist in our contemporary capitalist society, practically and institutionally if not conceptually?
The Law and Political Economy Society (www.lpesoc.org) at Berkeley is a student-run organization dedicated to fostering interest and discussion in LPE, offering a community through which students and practitioners can build creative thinking, dissent, and systemic critique into their study and practice. In the wake of Justice Ginsburg’s sad and untimely death, we must unfortunately…
What does civil procedure have to do with LPE? On the one hand, you might think of procedural rules as only instrumentally important. They don’t dictate our obligations, like tort law or criminal law, or define the terms of economic organization, like property law. But anyone wondering why procedure gets a prime place in the…
The nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is on the knife’s edge. The stakes are higher than for the confirmation of any American judge in our lifetimes. For that reason alone, it is probably not a good time to stage a general debate whether and in what sense law is something more than…
Thursday’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing was a stomach churning, nauseating affair. Christine Blasey Ford laid her life on the tracks, knowing full well that trains delivering important men can rarely be stopped. That was enough, but then came the turn: Brett Kavanaugh, partisan warrior. He tore into Democrats for a process almost entirely dictated by…
Building a popular environmental movement will take longer than suing the government.
Shelley Welton discusses the political hurdles facing modern public power movements, and Jed Britton-Purdy interviews Shitong Qiao about neighborhood democratization in urban China. Plus, a save the date for the inaugural Association of Law and Political Economy conference, the first LPE NYC happy hour of the summer, an upcoming ACS panel on building worker & tenant power, Sam Moyn on the limitations of freedom as independence, and Delaney Nolan on Louisiana’s “creative” system for funding eviction courts.
