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.
This post is part of a series on Black Lives Matters. The COVID-19 pandemic and police killings of George Floyd and other Black men and women have starkly revealed society’s race and class-based inequality and brought unprecedented attention to the excesses of the carceral state. One arm of punitive state regulation, however, has gone largely undiscussed:…
In this watershed moment when policymakers feel liberated to embrace noncarceral responses to the behaviors that laws label crimes, one question rings out: “What about rape and domestic violence?” The pro-policing contingent intends this as a rhetorical “gotcha.” But many progressives open to meaningful reform genuinely worry about the demise of gender crime law, which they see as a formidable legal tool against the patriarchy.
Amy Kapczynski is Professor of Law at Yale Law School, a co-founder of the LPEblog, and a faculty co-director of the LPE Project and the Yale Global Health Justice Partnership. My work focuses on law and political economy, and broadly aims to theorize the failures of legal logic and structure that condition contemporary inequality, precarity,…
This week at the Blog… we continued our symposium on the legal representation of poor people. On Monday, Gregory Louis argued that critical legal practice requires a critical realist approach to law: looking everywhere, not just courts, to interfere in the political contests that structure and restructure governance regimes. On Tuesday, Sam Allison-Natale engaged with two…
This is part of our symposium on the legal representation of poor people. In Professor Hershkoff and Loffredo’s post contextualizing their comprehensive handbook within the LPE movement, we can detect a certain irony. As they acknowledge, many lawyers, particularly those trained at elite institutions, eschew the representation of low-income communities for a host of reasons amounting…
The question of how to put LPE into practice in legal services work naturally raises questions around methodology: who should elucidate and fulfill an agenda for life-affirming social change, and how should we go about it? More specific to lawyering, who should occupy the role of a lawyer fighting alongside her clients for racial and economic justice?
