10 Hidden Gems from the Archives
By
Editors
If you’re an egalitarian, why are you only playing the hits?
Searching: courts
The Law and Political Economy Project
Transition Day
By
Luke Herrine
Today is a big day at the Blog.
Weekly Roundup: July 30, 2021
By
LPE Editors
At the Blog We hosted the second and final part of our symposium on Courts and Capitalism, which is part of the Democracy Beyond Neoliberalism conference: Joey Fishkin wrote about the long history of the Supreme Court’s opposition to democracy, drawing on his forthcoming book The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution. Judge Lynn Adelman wrote about judges’ role…
On Judging Cases in the Context of Crisis
By
Lynn Adelman
I thank the Law and Political Economy Project for inviting me to participate in this blog symposium on capitalism and the courts. I begin by stating the obvious: that we live in a capitalist economic system and a political system that aspires to being democratic. There is clearly considerable tension between these systems. Most capitalists…
Weekly Roundup: July 23, 2021
By
LPE Editors
At the Blog We started a symposium on Courts and Capitalism, carried over from the Democracy Beyond Neoliberalism conference. Kathryn Sabbeth initiated the proceedings with a detailed meditation on the many points at which our system of litigation privileges the development of rich people’s law and underdevelops poor people’s law. Matthew Dimick turned the conversation…
Market-Based Law Development
To understand courts’ relation to the reproduction of economic domination requires close investigation of how they actually work for different types of litigants.
Coalminers and Coordination Rights
In the two decades before the Hepburn Act’s enactment, two entities vied for the right to coordinate the price and distribution of coal. The first—a group known as the Joint Conference of Miners and Operators of the Central Competitive Field—was the child of the United Mine Workers.The second—a group of coal-hauling railroads known as the Seaboard Coal Association—was the child of J. P. Morgan and the Pennsylvania Railroad. Understanding their struggle for power (and why capitalists rather than workers won), can help us better understand the stakes of antitrust.
School Segregation, Social Closure, and the Anti-Monopoly Analogy
In my new article, Monopolizing Whiteness, I examine the causes and consequences of “white island districts,” i.e. those that enroll predominantly white and affluent student bodies, despite being in racially and economically diverse metropolitan areas. I theorize that white student segregation in districts like GPSD is a product of (what sociologists refer to as) social closure— a process of subordination whereby an in-group works to curtail an out-group from accessing resources constructed as scarce. I suggest that the “essential facilities” framework of antitrust law can help to illustrate what a legal framework looks like that could appropriately recognize and address the process and harms of social closure.
Jewishness as Property under Israeli Law
Understanding the law’s role in the project of Israeli colonization requires examining how distinct legal frameworks applied across a legally fragmented space can nevertheless share a common defining logic. One manifestation of this shared logic becomes evident by scrutinizing claims to land adjudicated by Israeli courts: Israeli state agencies and Jewish settler groups are treated as presumptively proper claimants of property while non-Jewish Palestinians are treated, at best, as dwellers who are not entitled to claim property but merely inhabit the land at the sufferance of Israeli authorities.
LPE Originals
Antoine Vauchez
By
LPE Editors
Antoine Vauchez is a CNRS Research Professor at Université Paris 1–Sorbonne and a Permanent Visiting Professor at the iCourts research center at the University of Copenhagen.
Government Failures and Private Options
Increasingly progressives are championing “public options” as a response to various market failures. Public options in the all-important health care space stand in for old-school regulation of private providers and old-school redistribution (to better support those struggling to pay for private insurance and medical services). Public options in banking, likewise championed by leading progressives, work substantially…
Family Choice and the American Dream
By
Julie Suk
More so than blind faith in the market, U.S. family policy embraces the principle that government should not intrude into parents’ choices on whether and how to raise children.
The Pitfalls of Platform Analogies in Reconsidering the Shape of the First Amendment
Are social media platforms more like common carriers or newspapers? The answer is neither. And that answer has significant implications for how Courts should treat regulation of content moderation.
Law, Metrics, and the Scholarly Economy
As markets began to usurp other forms of social regulation throughout the 20th century, metrics became increasingly central to the coordination of new spheres of market-mediated relations. More recently, digital metrics have been operationalized to facilitate the platformization of those domains. Platforms use automated scoring systems to rank content and actors across the markets they mediate. Search engines, e-commerce sites, and social media feeds all have ways to rank material and deliver it to users according to their calculation of “relevance.” This post explores metrics and gatekeeper power through the Google Scholar platform and its intermediation of the “scholarly economy”—the domain in which research is produced, consumed, bought and sold.
Exit, Voice, and the First Amendment Treatment of Social Media
By
Robert Post
Would reconsidering the state/private action divide in First Amendment jurisprudence just unleash a torrent of endlessly abusive communications and misinformation of all kinds? Can antitrust categories help to solve the problem?