One of the great dangers of our national climate policy vacuum is that the fox will happily take charge of the henhouse. In North Carolina, a partnership between Big Pig and Big Energy foreshadows a troubling realignment of the forces of oligarchy…
The law treats animals as objects with no legally-recognized rights or interests. Changing the basic legal status of animals will make positive change easier to achieve.
Animal agriculture relies on cultural myths about farming. The animal rights movement seeks to build countervailing narratives that center the ugly reality. The result is an ongoing legal battle about speech, truth, and visibility.
Big Meat’s rise to power is not the result of entrepreneurial savvy exercised in a free market. Multinational meat conglomerates have flourished because they are massively subsidized at the public’s expense.
In today’s post I explore how the success of those encampments presents a vision of contracting that counters the traditional Lochner-esque “freedom of contract” through the occupation and democratization of the right to contract which, under a commodified housing system, ultimately enlivens the right to housing.
This summer, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the corresponding racial justice uprising, a coalition of unhoused people and organizers with the Black and Brown Workers Cooperative and the Workers Revolutionary Collective quietly hitched some tents in a park just off the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in downtown Philadelphia.
Scholarship thus far has not reconciled the relationship between democratized agency policymaking and the regular lawmaking done by Congress. To ameliorate the inexorable agency costs, theorists generally pose two different solutions: (1) a democratization of agency discretion, e.g., by making notice and comment procedures more robust; or (2) forcing Congress to elaborate their intent in fine-grained detail or undertake more robust oversight. Both moves inadvertently replicate a conceptual mistake committed by many anti-administrativists. This essay will rectify this mistake.
We aim to show polluters—and their lawyer-enablers—that they are being watched; that a new generation of lawyers will not stand idly by as they are complicit in plunder. By circulating this information as widely as possible, we hope to enable people of conscience to ostracize the offending firms.
The reinterpretation of antitrust in terms of “consumer welfare” has not resulted in bountiful consumer welfare, but oligarchy unleashed. But, as I wrote in the Journal of Law and Political Economy, antitrust can be a force for fairness and democracy again. A reimagined antitrust law that restricts consolidation of business assets and permits certain forms of coordination among small actors would limit domination and disperse power.
It is an exercise in futility to accept the legitimacy of colonial constructs such as race, gender, property, and state sovereignty, and then work to equalize relations defined in these terms. These constructs are, themselves, the “master’s tools,” designed to perpetuate relations of domination and subordination. Moreover, a more equitable division of the spoils of conquest, should that be possible, wouldn’t change the underlying power dynamics. This is because settler sovereignty has been defined precisely to prevent those under the state’s claimed jurisdiction from exercising self-determination, the right of all peoples to “freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.”
In which the launch of the Journal of Law and Political Economy is announced!
Suing China for the harms wrought by COVID may seem in contrast to a global justice approach of shared responsibility. But there’s no way to assess blame for COVID–or anything else–independently of how to allocate the burdens of prevention and mitigation.
The key to understanding the connection between rights and material conditions is a conception of democracy…. people who are suffering from certain basic forms of deprivation and disadvantage will find it impossible to exercise fundamental rights and they will be unable to participate meaningfully in the project of cooperative government. Liberties may become impossible to realize without sufficient primary goods, while membership status within the political community may be degraded by structural inequality of economic wherewithal. Such problems can be avoided, at least partially, if freedom of speech and religion are construed in ways that are sensitive to the material conditions for their meaningful exercise. Otherwise, the conditions for the cooperative project of self-government will be absent.
Some exciting developments in LPE land amidst the widening gyre! A new Deputy Director, a new LPE101 Course…
Emma Caterine is a consumer rights attorney at The Law Office of Ahmad Keshavarz in Brooklyn, NY, specializing in abusive and deceptive practices in debt collection and credit reporting. Emma is also on the board of the Modern Money Network, a nonprofit seeking to provide information to the public on financial, fiscal, and monetary policy. Emma is a proud member of…
