According to the official organs of the family policing system, their goal is to ensure that children are safe and receive proper care. But a closer look at this system demonstrates just how little concern it has for the well-being of children. Instead, its primary purpose is to punish parents – a cruelty exacerbated by the fact that we live in a country that makes parenting nearly impossible.
Dorothy Roberts, Wendy Bach, Amna Akbar, & Nancy Polikoff reflect on Torn Apart and Prosecuting Poverty. Plus, Noah Rosenblum on Trump’s plan for the federal bureaucracy, the FTC answers our telemarketing prayers, a special issue on Antitrust in the Age of Concentrated Power, and the JLPE seeks a copy editor.
The carceral state is in a deep legitimacy crisis, with questions about its proper function up for public debate, and social movements pushing for care, public safety, and accountability. Municipalities, meanwhile, are experimenting with non-police responses to varied social problems. These efforts are important: they signal that abolitionist organizing and social insurgency have built sufficient power that the political elite has had to respond. But as Dorothy Roberts and Wendy Bach teach us, care often provides cover for criminalization, and the deployment of professional services often works hand in glove with systems of punishment.
Far from promoting the well-being of children, the so-called child welfare system weaponizes children as a way to threaten families, to scapegoat parents for societal harms to their children, and to buttress the racist, patriarchal, and capitalist status quo. Torn Apart tears off the benevolent veneer of family policing to reveal its political reality and argues that it must be abolished. To achieve this end, we need a paradigm shift in the state’s relationship to families — a reimagining of the very meaning of child welfare.
Neo-Brandeisian and other legal scholars generally associate Brandeis with America’s own anti-monopoly traditions. Yet Brandeis himself drew inspiration from developments unfolding across the Atlantic, and in contrast to Postwar America, where many of his institutional insights were eventually abandoned, the European competition regime has gradually gravitated toward an increasingly Brandeisian approach.
Ntina Tzouvala on the ongoing Afghan central bank saga, Eva Nanopoulos on the contradictions of “peaceful” sanctions, and Aslı Bâli on the parasitic relationship between sanctions and economic asymmetry. Plus, last call to apply to the coolest job in the universe, videos from Money as a Democratic Medium 2.0, the Dig tackles AI, David Dayen on projection at the FTC, Brian Callaci channels AO Hirschman on non-competes, and Brian Highsmith reviews David Schleicher’s In a Bad State.
Humanitarian concerns have generally failed to bring about concrete legal limits on the use of sanctions as a tool of foreign policy. However, as the ongoing saga concerning the Afghan central bank’s assets indicates, they have succeeded in something much more fundamental: they have legitimized the use of sanctions as a tool for undoing and re-assembling the sovereignty of a postcolonial state.
How might organized labor be engaged in ending mass incarceration? One approach is to emphasize how carceral labor is exploited as a substitute for rights-bearing “free labor.” But the mere threat of substitution does not ensure solidarity. A more promising avenue is to consider how carcerality itself extends into so-called “free” labor markets. Under this “carceral labor continuum,” anti-carceral unionism emerges not from broad concerns over economic substitution but instead from the practical demands of workplace organizing.
Martha McCluskey on tax policy and climate change, Han Lu and Bernard Callegari on fighting back against the exploitation of formerly incarcerated workers, and Andrew Ross and Aiyuba Thomas on the past, present, and future of the prisoners’ rights movement in Alabama. Plus, a new issue of the JLPE, a call for abstracts on courts and politics, a virtual book salon on the political economy of finance, and new articles by Kate Redburn, Liz Sepper, and James Nelson.
Over the past decade, the Free Alabama Movement has led a series of escalating prison strikes that have attracted tens of thousands of incarcerated participants nationwide. While labor stoppages have been central to the movement’s growth, its strategies and demands extend far beyond the realm of work and wages.
Joel Michaels on risk-weighting, Rebecca McLennan on the nineteenth-century roots of carceral labor, and Stephen Wilson, Minali Aggarwal, Jacqueline Groccia, and Lydia Villarong on why incarcerated people work. Plus, the hottest job in LPE Land is up for grabs, Saule Omarova and Ilmi Granoff discuss green banking, and Jed Britton-Purdy argues that the courts should be more political.
Popular historical narratives often trace the origins of penal labor to the post-Civil War South. Yet as insightful and politically useful as this familiar story may be, it overlooks the vast system of forced penal servitude that took shape in the antebellum North. Untangling the nineteenth-century roots of mass incarceration and forced labor can help clarify the shifting dynamics of expropriation, exploitation, and racialization across the long history of the U.S. carceral state.
Sabeel Rahman on the Biden Administration’s overhaul of the regulatory review process, Yanbai Andrea Wang on the role of civil procedure in U.S.-China Relations, and Alex Wang on the benefits of empathy in comparative legal analysis. Plus, interviews with Julie Suk on her new book and Gabriel Winant on class composition in the 21st century, new essays by Molly Coleman, Aaron Benanav, and Tim Barker, and a student note that endeavors to analyze US election law through an LPE lens.
In comparison with American courts, which increasingly adjudicate a narrow set of transnational cases, Chinese courts rarely forfeit authority over transnational cases. This development is reshaping the landscape of transnational litigation, as China’s appetite for taking on transnational cases calls attention to the advantages of exercising jurisdiction over a case — advantages that can dictate the outcome of cases in favorable ways, and which play an underappreciated role in the configuration of the international legal order.
There is an urgent need to develop a genuine critical left internationalism to help think through issues related to China. Yet engaging this subject from an LPE perspective confronts two broad challenges. First, it requires bringing LPE concepts into conversation with debates regarding the diverse legal underpinnings of the global economic order. Second, it requires developing a left internationalism that embraces a non-U.S.-centric anti-imperialist position, moving beyond limited Cold War imaginaries.
