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The Law and Political Economy Project
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: November 18, 2022

By LPE Editors

Helen Hershkoff and Luke Norris on the Oligarchic Courthouse, Missy Risser-Lovings on training students to partner with grassroots organizing groups, and Stephanie Campos-Bui on the use of creative, non-litigation strategies to address systemic racial, economic, and social injustice. Plus, an upcoming event on Jamie Martin’s The Meddlers, two CFPs, and the coolest job in Western Massachusetts.
Symposium

Where the Law Falls Short: The Value of an Interdisciplinary Approach to Problem Solving

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Many of us went to law school in the hopes of acquiring the tools necessary to contest and overhaul systems of oppression that have harmed our families and communities. The law, as we saw it, was the means or site of resolution. Yet for the increasingly complex and interconnected social problems that face our communities, traditional means of lawyering through direct services and litigation are often insufficient and ill-fitting. By taking an interdisciplinary approach, Berkeley’s Policy Advocacy Clinic is able to locate creative, non-litigation strategies to address systemic racial, economic, and social injustice.
Symposium

Leveraging Law School Clinics Against Family Policing

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Every year, the American family policing system separates roughly half a million children from their parents. This system, though long overlooked, is increasingly being recognized for what it is: a way to control and terrorize politically marginalized communities. To date, however, challenges to family policing have largely focused on state agencies as the primary actors in this system, and courtrooms as the primary battleground, while paying less attention to other driving forces like capitalism, public-private relationships, and the powerful investigative and administrative structures in which the judicial venue is nested. Taking the lead from abolitionist’s broader work that seeks to fundamentally re-draw relationships and the distribution of resources, law school clinics should similarly expand their advocacy beyond now well-trod legal paths.
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: November 4, 2022

By LPE Editors

SAQ week at the blog, featuring Ntina Tzouvala on Marxism and international law, Wendy Brown and Amy Kapczynski on democracy, and Veena Dubal on essentially dispossessed workers. Plus, a new site on progressive competition policy, an interview with Karen Levy, and how ex-twitterati can keep up with the blog.
Essay

Trans Emancipation Through Challenging the State

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With unrelenting devastation, the lives of transgender people are being targeted in prisons, streets, schools, and state capitals. This all-encompassing violence toward trans/queer people is often framed as a product of individual hate and transphobia, a cynical political ploy, or both. And the solution to such violence is often framed as recognition of trans identities by the state. Two new books by leading scholars of gender and political science broaden our understanding of the source of this violence, underscoring the degree to which it represents a defining feature of government and governing more broadly.

Essay

Democracy Without Law?

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Two different mortal threats to democracy have been on vivid display this past year: Trump’s January 6 insurrection and the Supreme Court’s rampage through statutory and constitutional law. Considering these events on split-screen raises some uncomfortable questions about LPE analysis of democracy, law, and courts. In particular, certain law-is-just-politics views deployed to dismiss the Court seem to foreclose criticism of Trump’s attempted coup as lawless. More generally, for democratic institutions to assert and receive primacy requires some conception of law that does not just dissolve back into “politics.”
Essay

The Right to Counsel in a Neoliberal Age

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Over the past forty years, the Supreme Court has increasingly recognized the rights of defendants in criminal proceedings to exert autonomy over their own representation, including dispensing with counsel. Analyzing these developments in Sixth Amendment jurisprudence, this post argues that encoding defendant choice into constitutional rules will likely deepen, rather than mitigate, the structural inequalities at the heart of the criminal legal system.
Symposium

The Reactive Model of Reasonable Accommodation

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The concept of reasonable accommodations at the heart of the ADA severely undercuts the efficacy of the law. Employers, public entities, and private businesses are allowed to ignore the inaccessible nature of their programs or activities until an individual with a disability seeks (or begs) for access. This reactive, individualized model does little to prevent mass-produced inaccessibility.

Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: October 7, 2022

By LPE Editors

Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant, and Karen Tani blow the doors off a new symposium on Marta Russell and the Political Economy of Disability, while Rick Weinmeyer calls attention to our public reliance on privately owned toilets. Plus, a new issue of the JLPE, as well as articles by Aziz Rana, Sanjukta Paul, and about the noble work that Sabeel Rahman and others are doing at OIRA.
Essay

The Public Reliance on Private Toilets

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When most people consider the crisis of American infrastructure, they imagine crumbling roads and bridges, decrepit schools and hospitals, or dysfunctional railways and power grids. This post calls attention to a different, often overlooked component of American infrastructure — public restrooms. Specifically, it argues for a constitutional right to public restroom access, grounded in state constitutional provisions dedicated to public health.