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The Law and Political Economy Project
Essay

Why Should Tenant Unions Look to Labor Law?

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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.
Symposium

The Deep Roots Linking Help and Punishment

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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.
Symposium

Caring for Children by Punishing Parents

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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.
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: July 21, 2023

By LPE Editors

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.
Symposium

Under the Guise of Care

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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.
Symposium

Building a World Without Family Policing

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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.
Essay

Brandeis in Brussels: What American Reformers Can Learn from the European Union

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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.
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: June 30, 2023

By LPE Editors

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.
Symposium

Successful Failures: Economic Sanctions, Humanitarianism, and the Undoing of Post-Colonial Sovereignty

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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.

Symposium

From Work in Prison to Carcerality at Work

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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.
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: May 26, 2023

By LPE Editors

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.
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: May 19, 2023

By LPE Editors

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.
Symposium

Untangling the Nineteenth-Century Roots of Mass Incarceration

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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.