From Vacancy to Decommodification: Co-Cities and the Enabling State
When vacant land and structures fall into the hands of the state, new possibilities emerge. How can local governments transform these assets into co-governed spaces?
Searching: courts
The Law and Political Economy Project
Taking Democracy Seriously in the Administrative State
In a society as deeply divided as our own, it is fanciful to think that we will be able to deliberate our way to a consensus. To resolve the longstanding puzzle of the administrative state’s democratic legitimacy, we need to resist the neoliberal impulse to erase politics and, instead, design opportunities for genuine contestation.
LPE Originals
Applications III: Labor and Anti-Monopoly
By
LPE Editors
Week 7’s readings address the historic and contemporary relationships between labor and anti-monopoly. Three key themes cut across these readings. First, several of the readings discuss how antitrust law has historically been used—and continues to be used—to stifle worker organizing and collective action, despite the original pro-labor purpose of the antitrust laws. As the readings…
LPE Originals
Unpacking the Anti-Monopoly Toolkit II: Antitrust and Competition
By
LPE Editors
Week 4 dives into a second key tool in the anti-monopoly and regulated industries toolkit: antitrust. Several of the readings discuss the origins and inadequacies of the predominant approach to antitrust law today—a court-centered regime driven by a focus on consumer welfare. Reviewing Tim Wu’s The Curse of Bigness, Lina Khan charts the “decades-long project…
Weekly Roundup: April 29, 2022
By
LPE Editors
Kate Jackson on the democratic virtues of administrative agencies, Luke Norris on a progressive vision of civil procedure, and the Sustainable and Global Economic Law research project invites you to summer in Amsterdam!
Procedural Political Economy
By
Luke Norris
Civil procedure is the infrastructure of democracy, allowing the public to interpret, elaborate, and entrench constitutional-regulatory commitments over time. Rather than sidelining courts entirely, a revival of the democracy-of-opportunity tradition should include a progressive vision of procedure.
Democracy, Bureaucracy, and Rights
“It is not true that the U.S. Constitution has little to say about our economic rights and liberties – let alone our material welfare. Instead, as Fishkin and Forbath argue convincingly, the Constitution has nourished a democracy-of-opportunity tradition that places our equal social rights front-and-center in constitutional practice and politics.”
Constitutional Political Economy for a Democracy, Not an Oligarchy
In the introduction to a symposium on their new book, The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution, Joseph Fishkin and William E. Forbath make the case for reviving interest among progressives in constitutional political economy.
The Antitrust Case Against Gig Economy Labor Platforms
In the fight to regulate the gig economy, unions, workers, and their allies have only fought half the battle: they have tried to defend the definition of employment against technology-enabled erosion. Antitrust prohibitions against vertical restraints, which prevent firms from exercising control in the absence of an employment relationship, offer a complementary strategy to address the threat posed to workers by the gig economy.
Root and Branch Reconstruction in Antitrust: A Symposium
Given the shortcomings of the prevailing antitrust framework, a growing chorus of voices is calling for a ground-up reconstruction of competition law and policy. But what would that look like? This symposium offers an affirmative vision of the new antitrust.
A Conversation about LPE & Disability, Part 2
In the second part of their conversation on LPE & disability, Rabia Belt, Doron Dorfman, Jasmine Harris, Jamelia Morgan, and Karen Tani discuss what LPE could gain from paying greater attention to disability, and where scholars interested in the nexus of disability and LPE should turn for additional resources.
Profiting from the Efforts of Others: Understanding Property-as-Capital
The annual ranking of the world’s richest highlights the often dramatic shifts, upwards and downwards, in the net wealth of elites. What do these fluctuations tell us about the nature of the things – the property – these elites own, and about the nature of property in contemporary capitalism?
Labor Law and Employer Domination: From Steel to Care
Postwar steelworkers and contemporary healthcare workers inhabited strikingly different economic circumstances. Yet in both eras, courts allocated to companies various powers they could use to impose market discipline on workers, thereby facilitating the degradation of work.
Weekly Roundup: February 11, 2022
By
LPE Editors
The American judiciary as a structurally conservative institution, a new symposium on inflation(!), and everything you always wanted to know about the Fed but were too afraid to ask. Plus, three conference announcements.
Remembering Lani Guinier
Gerald Torres reflects on the ideas that animated the life of Lani Guinier.