Theories of Capitalism, Programs for Transformation
To design the right program for capitalism’s legal transformation, we must begin with the right theory of capitalism.
Searching: courts
The Law and Political Economy Project
The Legal Infrastructure of Sewer Socialism
As cities across the country fight to take back control of their utilities, Milwaukee’s Sewer Socialists demonstrate what cities can achieve through local ownership, and why state regulation often serves private interests over the public good.
What Law Cannot Explain (or Solve) about Capitalism
If capitalism is a legal regime above all else, then legal reform is not only necessary but sufficient in order to achieve democratic self-governance, ecological sustainability, and equality. As the collapse of the WTO and the rise of China suggest, however, law alone does not decide who holds economic power.
Rewriting the Laws of Capitalism
When new constitutional orders came about in the 18th and 19th centuries, they left intact the private legal order that they inherited from feudalism, entrenching property rights and contracts as bulwarks against economic democracy. Reforming this system will require placing private law on a normative foundation that is compatible with democratic self-ordering.
Weekly Roundup: Oct. 9
By
Editors
Two new entries in our LPE vs. Law and Economies series: James Tierney considers what LPE could want from a method, and Darren Bush, Mark Glick, and Gabriel Lozada search far and wide for “contemporary” law and economics. Plus, an upcoming LPE Night School event on the NYC housing crisis, Sam Levine on governing AI for consumers and workers, Ben Kaufman on the scourge of the lower courts, Lenore Palladino on the potential of public credit funds, and Joel Michaels on how to restore Congress’s fiscal powers.
Doing Applied Administrative Law
Administrative law is often described as “transsubstantive”: in understanding, evaluating, and articulating the rules governing federal agency action across public health, environmental regulation, national security, and sundry other domains, law schools and legal scholarship treat administration as a single enterprise. What would it take to move beyond transsubstantivity and make administrative law more attentive to context? A recent project on drug scheduling offers some insights.
Capital and Law as Social Forms
Where do profits come from? And how does law legitimate capitalism? To make progress on these questions, we must dig deeper into the nature of capital and the idea of the legal form.
Big Little Lies
By
Luke Herrine
What the history of multilevel marketing can teach us about our political moment.
Off with the Lotus Eaters
By
Editors
Before the Blog goes on its annual August hiatus, we count down the ten most read posts of 2026 so far, say a fond farewell to our departing student editors, and welcome three new additions to the team.
Revisiting The Constitutional Bind during the Interregnum
By
Aslı Ü. Bâli
As the country marks 250 years, the left faces two imperatives at once: confronting a constitutional order warped by judicial supremacy, and reorienting American foreign policy away from endless war.
Against Legislative Primacy
By
M. Sandhu
On this blog and elsewhere, Congress has recently been cast as a cure for our decrepit democracy. This push for legislative primacy is a mistake: it valorizes a deeply undemocratic institution, relies on a selective reading of the past, and distracts us from vital debates about the policies we should be pursuing and persuading others to support.
Two Dogmas of LPE Critics
Is LPE scholarship anti-empirical? Has contemporary law and economics become a neutral social science? Don’t believe everything you hear in Chicago.
What is LPE? An ALPE Lightning Round
What is LPE? Is it a reaction to law and economics? Does it have a method? What is its normative north star? At this year’s ALPE conference, Amy Kapczynski, Corinne Blalock, Aslı Bâli, Sabeel Rahman, Angela Harris, and Yochai Benkler offered their best answers to these questions in two sentences or less.
The Informal Governance of Global Capitalism
By
Wanshu Cong
The marginalization of international law under the second Trump administration has been a shock to the post-Cold War world order. Yet the impact of this development on the global economy has been far from uniform. Some of the most important sectors to trade — including telecommunications and civil aviation — were already governed primarily through informal, political arrangements.
Outsourcing Deportation: The Expansion of Third Country Removal
As of May 2026, the United States has agreements with at least 27 countries to accept deportees who are neither nationals nor citizens of those countries. Seen from one perspective, this emerging regime looks like a natural extension of efforts by the United States and other countries to externalize refugee obligations and offshore migrant policing. In practice, however, third country deportation is more sinister — more akin to an illegal, “black site” extraordinary rendition than a judicial removal proceeding.