Stephen Breyer called it more valuable than circuit court precedents and Supreme Court Justices. Yet the Areeda-Hovenkamp treatise on antitrust law adopts misleading legal interpretations that systematically favor corporate power in at least two key areas: thresholds for exclusive-dealing foreclosure and the efficiencies defense for mergers. Time for a reappraisal of an antitrust staple.
Private equity firms, cloaked under protective securities laws, have increasingly acquired companies that provide goods and services in U.S. jails and prisons. But it is the legal construction of prisoners’ rights that has enabled this market to take the particular form that it has, turning community ties into steady payment streams. In particular, Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, which has affirmed the constitutionality of pay-to-stay fees, has transformed the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment into a (subordinating) right to credit.
Asher Morse on how labor agreements could Trump-proof federal agencies, Talia Rothstein on what the creation of law clinics left behind, and Veena Dubal and Renan Kalil on the push to export exploitative US labor laws to Brazil. Plus, a call (by us) for the best new LPE work, two amazing jobs for 3Ls or recent grads, a video of our event with Bernard Harcourt, an event series on full employment, Erik Baker on what strikes are for, Emily Prifogle on teaching Law in Rural America, and Erik Peinert and Morgan Harper on the high price of asthma inhalers caused by blatant patent manipulation.
Multinational platform companies, including Uber, iFood, Rappi, and 99, are currently pushing to export the United States’ most exploitative new labor laws to Brazil. Lawmakers should reject these attempts. As empirical evidence from the U.S. context shows, adopting a new “intermediate” worker category would be disastrous for low-income workers, and as Courts around the world have found, platform companies exert high levels of control over their workers and thus should be subject to standard labor and employment regulations.
Collective bargaining agreements offer the chance to proactively build in protections for federal workers that will be vital if a dangerously anti-administrative candidate like Trump or DeSantis takes office. But to take advantage of this opportunity, agency leadership must be conciliatory and collaborative in negotiations.
‘Law and Political Economy of Social Change‘ is the inaugural session of the New School’s LPE Night School. It is a conversation between Amy Kapczynski (Yale Law School) and Corinne Blalock (Law and Economy Project), moderated by Sandipto Dasgupta (NSSR) on law’s relationship to social change, and how law structures our political and economic lives. The Night School…
Paul Gowder on democratizing big tech, Ntina Tzouvala on legal theory in the lowercase, and Yiran Zhang on the disciplinary bureaucracy of our home care system. Plus, LPE night school, a new paper by Sanjukta Paul, Ganesh Sitaraman on airline deregulation, a must-read symposium at Bill of Health, Jessica Whyte reviews Quinn Slobodian, and a forum on Solidarity.
With bipartisan calls to break up big tech, it is worth pausing to ask whether the proposed remedy matches the diagnosis of the problem. Antitrust breakups work best when there’s a clear conflict between public and company interests. Yet with some of the most pressing problems – such as the spread of disinformation – company and public interests plausibly converge. An alternative approach would be to keep tech companies intact but integrate users and workers more directly into their governance systems.
The NLRB’s recent Cemex decision should discourage employers from resisting unionization and therefore make it easier for workers to gain bargaining rights. But how should we understand the basis of this decision? Brishen Rogers considers the case from three theoretical perspectives: the liberal legalist, the progressive functionalist, and the low-key Marxist.
In the case against the Stop Cop City activists, the state alleges a criminal conspiracy among people who have distributed flyers, coordinated a bail fund, and performed legal observation of protests. These charges are outlandish and represent a terrifying abuse of state power, but they are hardly novel. As the case of Ray Luc Levasseur shows, RICO has a long history of being used as an expansive assault on leftwing radicals.
Samuel Moyn theorizes about the need for theory, Greg Baltz and Shakeer Rahman question whether tenant unions should look to labor law for inspiration, and Maryam Jamshidi explains how terrorism torts could challenge Israeli settler violence. Plus, Veena Dubal on Glacier Northwest, Tim Barker on The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, Sandeep Vaheesan and Brian Callaci on protecting workers from employer power, and CFPs for three conferences you won’t want to miss.
Since the early 1990s, the United States has created a scheme of laws allowing private parties to sue individuals, organizations, and foreign countries for acts of terrorism in U.S. courts. While these laws have primarily been used to target and harass Palestinians, the recent spate of violence by Israeli settlers in the West Bank presents a potential if unexpected opportunity: to turn the tables on terrorism torts.
With tenant organizing on the rise across the United States, legal scholars have been drawn to the idea that tenant unions, backed by the right legislative framework, could serve a function akin to labor unions. But labor and tenancy serve different functions for capitalism. Housing is a commodity that tenants consume rather than produce, so tenants would be better served by universal protections, such as price controls and possessory rights, than by the right to good faith negotiation.
To kick off another school year, two 3L LPE fans (and Blog editors) reflect on what LPE has to offer to new law students.
Throughout America’s history, the deep-seated idea that poverty is fundamentally a moral failing on the part of the poor has shaped social welfare policies and practices. If they could run their lives properly, the logic goes, they would not be poor in the first place. Accordingly, poor and non-white folks cannot be trusted to care for their children, and thus need to be coerced, through the threat of punishment, into forms of supposedly “therapeutic” state interventions.
