The Case for Universal Labor and Employment Rights
Taking up Anne Alstott & Ganesh Sitaraman’s arguments in favor of the public option, this post makes a case for universal labor and employment rights.
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The Law and Political Economy Project
Reading Bail Reform Through a Critical Race Lens
Critical race theory can supply a framework for interpreting bail reform, as it renders legible the carceral reproduction of racial hierarchies as well as the law’s normalization of anti-Black criminalization.
Community Bail Funds as a Tool for Prison Abolition
Four organizers with the National Bail Fund Network explore how community bail funds can serve as tools to advance abolitionist movement building.
Moving from Ending Money Bail to Demanding Pretrial Freedom
Four organizers with the National Bail Fund Network provide a critique of dominant “bail reform” agendas, arguing for a more ambitious vision of pretrial freedom.
What Comes After Money Bail? An LPE Perspective on Pretrial Detention
This is the first post in our series on Money Bail. Click here to read all posts in the series. It is no longer controversial to say that our current system of money bail is flawed. When more than 400,000 people are incarcerated pretrial at any one time—a majority there because they cannot afford the amount…
Addressing Race and Gender Inequities at the Root of Housing Injustice
NB: This post is part of a series in our Race for Profit symposium. Read all posts here. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor demonstrates in Race for Profit, housing exclusion, instability, and segregation are all racialized in nature, and sewn into the very fabric of American institutions, policies, and value systems. During the height of redlining in the mid-20th century,…
Executive Action as Power Building: A Response to Professor Doerfler
By
Luke Herrine
Ryan Doerfler has an article over at Jacobin reacting in part to my argument that current law enables the Secretary of Education to cancel as much student debt as she wants by using her enforcement discretion. Professor Doerfler is not so much arguing against my proposal (for which he has some flattering words) as he…
The Case for Basic Health
We seem to be approaching an apotheosis of liberal health care angst, as the irresistible force of the appeal of truly universal health care meets the immovable object of Democrats’ desire to make double-triple-sure not to lose the 2020 election. Replacing our current shambles of a health care system with something much simpler and more…
Re-drawing the Boundaries of the Corporate Person and Democratizing Global Markets
This post comes out of the early career workshop ‘Law and Political Economy in Europe’, which took place at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, at the University of Oxford, on the 7th of October 2019. The French corporate law professor Jean-Philippe Robé does not grow tired of reiterating that legal scholars (but also political scientists and…
The Constitutional Role of Economic Coordination Rights
There’s a common notion that pervades legal and policy debate—including among fairly liberal Democrats—that collective bargaining mechanisms, and even public coordination of markets through minimum wages and working conditions, distort market outcomes and are therefore inefficient (though they may be justified by countervailing considerations). This position immediately sets up a kind of presumption against labor…
A Law and Political Economy Agenda for Labor and the Constitution
By
Kate Andrias
At the end of September, labor law scholars gathered at a conference focused on “Labor and the Constitution: Past, Present, and Future.” There, a group of us considered the problem of “Political Economy and the Constitution”—and the extent to which the Law and Political Economy (LPE) analytical frame can be useful in building a more…
A Political Economy the Constitution Requires
“Political economy” has an antique ring. More than a century ago, the field of “political economy” began to give way to what was called “economics.” By the mid-twentieth century, political economy was forgotten; economics ruled the roost. But what is old is new again. Political economy is coming back. Economics sidelines the distribution of wealth…
Teaching Trusts & Estate as Critical Wealth Genealogy
By
Allison Tait
Step into a Trusts & Estates classroom and you’ll find the first thing most students learn is that the guiding principle in U.S. wealth transfer law is freedom of disposition. As the Restatement (Third) of Property tells us: “The organizing principle of the American law of donative transfers is freedom of disposition. Property owners have…
Zarda, Just Work, and the Limits of Antidiscrimination Law
Today, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument on the question of whether Title VII’s prohibition on sex discrimination includes sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination. To provide context to this case, the LPE Blog asked two scholars for contributions that detail the history of sex discrimination protections and address how law should redress gender hierarchies…
Looking Beyond the Law: The Movement for LGBTQ Rights at Work
LGBTQ workers have never turned solely to the law to define or protect their rights. In years when many feminists and workers of color were narrowing their focus to pursuing individual advancement under antidiscrimination provisions like Title VII, LGBTQ workers articulated a new kind of right: to be fully oneself at work. They argued that sexuality and gender were irrelevant to job performance, as the older “homophile” gay rights movement had claimed. But they also denied that anyone could—or should—shed a piece of their identity at the office, factory, or schoolhouse door.