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…
All defendants need the opportunity to raise complaints with their representation before appeal. Reserving this for only those who were already able to hire counsel of their choice operates to further disenfranchise the most vulnerable people charged with crimes.
This week at the blog… …we began a symposium on the deep problems with the criminal legal system. On Monday, Tariq El-Gabalawy introduced the symposium. On Tuesday, Marcelo López and Alejandra Gutiérrez discussed the intergenerational impacts of incarceration on their own families and communities and how that has guided their thinking through law school and…
The failure to hold police accountable for their toxic culture has and continues to threaten the safety and Constitutional protections of vulnerable communities and disfavored groups.
Thursday – April 2, 2020 (Emerging Scholars Day) Session 1 Economic Rights (Raúl Carrillo, Zachary Manfredi, Jeff Gordon) Environmentalism (Ted Hamilton, Alyssa Battistoni, Ama Ruth Francis) The Corporate Form (Ioannis Kampourakis, Bharath Palle, Jay Varellas) Technology (Roel Dobbe, Sanjay Jolly, Dan Traficonte) Session 2 Trade & Labor (Pascal McDougall, Das Sannoy, Diana Reddy) Reimagining Subject…
Conversations about progressive possibilities for economic policy and political economy often undertheorize or ignore international trade. The international economy is often seen as a free-for-all between countries, a space where powerful multinational firms are able to play governments off one another, resulting in a race to the bottom of domestic laws and regulations. Or, it is seen in terms of competition between economies with coherent rules, laws, and industries in the domestic sphere, but where Ricardian comparative advantage wins out internationally. Competition in international markets is seen as a flat state of nature, a “real” free market. By convincing ourselves that international trade and competition exists in a void–or accepting the assumption that it does–we ignore how law, policy, and regulation reshape the economy and commercial relationships to favor certain groups at the expense of others.
This post is part of our symposium on socialist constitutionalism. The Federalist Society leverages right-wing legal change by promoting constitutional originalism as a seemingly noble and neutral foundation for neoliberal political economy. Without a comparably accessible and compelling contrary first principle, left and centrist law and politics can appear to be a diffuse agenda of contested…
Central banking and finance in the US have a curiously ‘dialectical’ history – a history mirroring, in interesting ways, that of our federal union itself. Both histories reflect ambivalence about, and hence oscillation both toward and away from, collective agency and its political manifestation in centralized governance. Tracing these parallel trajectories can shed helpful light upon certain features of American monetary history, finance-regulatory tendencies, and of course public finance.
Black Americans have endured police violence since the nation’s founding. The origins of American policing have been traced to slave patrols. Today, Blacks are more likely than whites to encounter police, to be stopped by police, and to be fatally wounded by police. In recognition of this history and ongoing experience of violence, the Movement for Black Lives (“M4BL”) has called for the defunding of the police; community control of policing; and the development of nonpunitive, noncarceral institutions for resolving social conflict, among other transformative changes.
