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The Law and Political Economy Project
Essay

The Law & Political Economy of Disability Accommodations

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The touchstone of contemporary disability law, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, was a victory of the militant disability rights movement, and was drafted with the social model in mind. However, Congress essentially delegated the design for this mandate to the Reagan-era EEOC, which in turn operationalized accommodations through private exchanges between employees and employers. Market logic further limited its redistributive work and society’s ability to critique its effectiveness.
Essay

Democratizing Governance to Advance Health Justice and Economic Democracy

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The inequities and exclusions of the U.S. health care system are well known, but the two prevailing strategies in health law and policy—privatization and technocracy—both fail to address disparities in power that produce health injustices. To advance health justice, we need multiple pathways through which everyday people—acting both as individuals and also as member-led associations of patients, families, health care workers, and members of the public—can meaningfully shape governance and advance accountability by contesting over real levers of power. Many possible legal mechanisms incorporate empowered participatory decision-making and accountability into health governance. Here, I explore five mechanisms that hold especially exciting potential.

Symposium

Law, Liberation, and Causal Inference

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The incorporation of empirical analysis via statistical methods into interpretive and normative legal frameworks calls for scrutiny into the nature of the role this input plays in the law. We can take lessons from disputes in statistical methodology and their use in the legal reasoning to better illuminate the more general relationship between “fact”-finding and normative judging. Let’s examine the sense in which racial discrimination can “cause” differential outcomes in police interactions, for example
Symposium

Reconstructing the Algebra of Race and Rights

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I follow Patricia Williams, Angela Harris & Aysha Pamukcu, in arguing universal rights, to basic income and other resources, are insufficient but necessary ingredients for justice. Indeed, I argue for permanent, non-discretionary funding of these rights. No one truly knows how much money the U.S. government spends encoding and encasing private property rights, much less private capital’s rights to coordinate or contract. In many ways, these costs are “baked into” society. So, ultimately, should it be for rights to income, healthcare, housing, education, employment for all.
Symposium

Basic Income and the Freedom to Refuse

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It would be ironic indeed if a UBI slipped quickly through the fingers of lower-income people of color and into the coffers of jurisdictions most aggressively criminalizing poverty. This would negate UBI’s ability to facilitate work refusal because UBI—devoured by debt—would no longer be available to meet basic needs without a wage (or connection to a wage-earner). Moreover, this negation’s radically unequal racial distribution would mock UBI’s pretensions to universalism. Substantive universality requires more than formal inclusion and nominally equal payments. It requires cash receipts that deliver equal capacity to refuse work.
Symposium

Liberal Property Law vs. Capitalism

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This is part of our symposium on Hanoch Dagan’s book, A Liberal Theory of Property. For a concise version of Dagan’s argument, see this restatement. Image credit: Sam Abell, National Geographic. Hanoch Dagan has written a wonderful, thoughtful, and thought-provoking book. Its publication could have hardly come at a more prescient time. Many observers and commentators rightly despair over the…
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: January 15, 2021

By LPE Editors

Aaaaaand we’re back! As the crises deepen, we’re doing our best to maintain our rigorous focus on the deep causes and what we can do about them. First things first: we have some new editors! Derrick Rice is a 3L at Yale Law School and a co-founder of the LPE student group. At the Blog,…
Essay

Constitutionalizing Property’s Priority over Farm Worker Organizing: The Threat of Cedar Point

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This year the Supreme Court will hear Cedar Points Nursery v. Hassid, a case out of California which challenges a forty-five-year-old farm labor regulation. The petitioners are alleging that this regulation, which grants farm labor unions a limited right of access to an employer’s property, is unconstitutional on the grounds that it amounts to the government taking their property rights without compensation. This case potentially represents the culmination of a decades-long reactionary campaign against the ability of unions to access an employer’s property. It’s another legal gut-punch to the labor movement and part of a long history of judicial antagonism against workers.
Essay

Democratizing Health Systems to Advance Health Justice

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The staggeringly disproportionate ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic among people of color, juxtaposed with the summer’s wave of protest against police violence against Black people in the United States, make clear that population health is bound up with existing patterns of social subordination. This reality transcends presidencies and pandemics—even in “normal” times, race, gender, and income play outsize roles in predicting health outcomes in this country. Yet, while the health system is a profoundly important social institution that often determines who lives and who dies, it has rarely been subject to the same level of scrutiny that has been directed at other systems we consider integral to how our democracy functions, such as the justice and electoral systems. In our recent piece, “Democracy and Health: Situating Health Rights within a Republic of Reasons,” we set out the contours of a health system that is grounded in an understanding of entitlements to health (public health and care) as assets of social citizenship. These contours include (1) public participation; (2) fair financing; (3) transparent and fair priority-setting processes; (4) universally acceptable, accessible, and adequate care; and (5) enforceable rights.