In Forbath’s telling, Weimar is not a cautionary tale but an opportunity for a do over. There’s much to like, and learn, from rekindling this vision of social democracy. In what follows, I invite other characters to this story, drawing from Mexico’s constitutional history, and raise a few questions about the limits of the social democratic bequest as a compass for our imagination.
In my last post, I began a discussion of the Weimar Constitution as one of the first constitutions containing provisions for social and economic rights (SER), and perhaps the very first one, in which socialists had an important hand drafting and expounding. The literature on constitutional SER misses a great deal when it casts the Weimar Constitution as a weak, infant version of later SER constitutions, which grew stronger over time.
Happy Juneteenth, everybody. See y’all in the streets. Look, we’re doing our second weekly roundup in a row! Surely this will last forever. This week at the blog: Brian Highsmith (returning LPE champion) explored the promise of and barriers to restructuring state budgets in this abolitionist moment. Amna Akbar reflected on the abolitionist moment at…
Fiscal structures and funding priorities that local public finance experts have long taken to be intractable are being challenged by a new generation. Although the scale of these actions certainly is new, community groups and local activists have long used tax and budget advocacy as a means for abolitionist organizing.
The price of food increased 2.6% in April, the largest single-month increase since 1974, but food industry executives are insisting that the country has enough food. So why are prices going up? The explanation provided by the industry is that consumers are buying more than they need, creating shortages. But a shortage is not a…
Dear Readers, When Amy Kapczynski introduces law and political economy, she often begins by describing a paradigmatic law student who arrives ready to fight injustice and is quickly sucked into an alienating vortex of efficiency-seeking and cost-benefit analyses. I was that student when I started law school, and by chance stumbled into the nascent LPE…
The Law and Society Association is holding its massive annual meeting online this year, and Law and Political Economy scholars will be there! The meeting takes place beginning this Thursday, May 28. Here is the link to the LSA conference page, where you can access sessions (LSA has said that only registered attendees may do…
This post is part of our ongoing coverage of the COVID-19 Crisis from an LPE Perspective. Sam Hull– As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, debate has begun over when and how to restart society. Some proposals, such as those that call for seniors to sacrifice themselves for the good of “the economy,” expose the inherent inhumanity…
As part of our ongoing effort to bring you the best LPE work on COVID-19, today we bring you this piece from John Whitlow, followed by a roundup of LPE COVID writing published elsewhere. The poet Langston Hughes once wrote, “I wish the rent was heaven sent.” With a record 10 million Americans filing for…
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.
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.
Four organizers with the National Bail Fund Network explore how community bail funds can serve as tools to advance abolitionist movement building.
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.
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…
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,…
