“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Gerald Torres reflects on the ideas that animated the life of Lani Guinier.
The week in review: lessons in legal mobilization, seven reactions to the Court’s decision blocking OSHA’s vaccine mandate, and a new paper on the IMF’s Stand-By Arrangement with Argentina.
What role do lawyers play in advancing progressive social change? Examining the recent history of labor activism in Los Angeles, Scott Cummings distills some lessons for legal mobilization in contemporary social movements.
The conventional interpretation of American antitrust law has neglected its democratic and egalitarian origins. As the Sherman Act’s legislative history makes evident, its primary target was the concentration of economic power, rather than coordination among workers, farmers, and other smaller producers.
The LPE Blog asks Amy Kapczynski, Aziz Rana, and Robert Tsai how we might fix the Constitution.
Caroline, Ann, and Luke highlight some of their favorite posts from 2021.
Some of our favorite posts from the past year.
