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The Law and Political Economy Project
LPE Originals

LPE NYC Night School: Courts – The Good, the Bad, and the Political Economy

By LPE Editors

”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…
LPE Originals

Open Course: What To Do About the Courts

By LPE Editors

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…
Essay

Race and Profit in the Civil Courts

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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.
LPE Originals

LPE Society’s People Over Courts: How to Beat an Extremist 6-3 Majority

By LPE Editors

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…
Essay

Political Courts and Democratic Politics

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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…
Essay

Partisan Warriors and Political Courts

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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…
Symposium

Constitutional Politics and Dilemmas on the Left

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Aziz Rana aims to free us from Constitution worship. An abiding faith in “redemptive” constitutionalism, his new book argues, has long held back liberals, progressives, and even the Left from seriously promoting major change in our structures of government. Yet key left figures and movements have always made canny use of redemptive constitutional narratives and arguments. Rejecting that tradition leaves far too much on the table.
Symposium

Toward a New Constitutional Politics

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Given the manifest flaws of the U.S. Constitution, how did Americans come to idolize this document? Aziz Rana kicks off a symposium on his new book, The Constitutional Bind, by reflecting on the path that led to our current political predicament, and how long-buried Left thinking about state and economy might help us find our way out of it.