Since the 1970s, Congress and federal agencies have replaced regulator-established rates with market-derived pricing in many sectors of the U.S. economy. Electricity and natural gas are two such industries. Congress and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) have abolished regulated rates and instituted market-based pricing in a part of the electricity and gas supply chains.…
This post is part of an ongoing series on LPE & Social Movements. In this moment of crisis for the rule of law, a number of thinkers on the left have prescribed new strategies for progressives to shift reigning ideas about constitutionalism and the law. Jedediah Purdy, for example, has argued that part of the…
Is it really a good idea for liberals and the left to be making constitutional arguments against economic inequality?
I recently interviewed a man in a weakened rural town who makes sausages for a local meat packing business on the 3am shift. He told me about a homeless woman who had come to the meat shop one dark morning with blood-soaked hands. Delirious with cold and exhaustion, she had punched in the glass on…
Earlier this fall, the LPE blog launched 1LPE, which aimed to provide a critical countervailing perspective on the doctrinal areas traditionally constituting the 1L curriculum. Take a look at what we’ve published – and get ready for more posts after the break!
Ask not for whom the First Amendment tolls: It tolls for you. Or so I argue in an essay just published at the Columbia Law Review online. It’s called “The Lochnerized First Amendment and the FDA: Toward a More Democratic Political Economy”—a boring title for a vital and urgent problem. Courts, speaking in the name…
Few cases were as difficult for me to initially grasp as Mullane v. Central Hanover Bank & Trust Co. (1950), a common case in first-year civil procedure courses. The appellant was a guardian ad litem, the opinion parsed the differences between jurisdiction in personam and in rem, and I woefully had never taken Latin. My…
Over a decade ago I wrote a short piece called “Poverty Law and Civil Procedure: Rethinking the First-Year Course [Poverty],” published as part of a symposium issue of the Fordham Urban Law Journal on the place of poverty in the law school curriculum. Reginald Heber Smith’s statement from 1919 was the epigraph: “The administration of…
The customary case caption in criminal court, “The People v. Defendant,” pits the community against one lone person in an act of collective condemnation. When I was a public defender in New York City, it was common for judges, clerks, and other courtroom players to refer to individual Assistant District Attorneys as “the People,” as…
This is the final post of a three-part series. Read Part I and Part II Part Three: The Substantive Constitution Reconstruction, Freedom, and Nullification: The Battles over the Fourteenth Amendment In 1872, newly-emancipated and enfranchised black Republicans won a wave of elections throughout the country, including in Grant Parish, Louisiana. The election was disputed and…
This is the second post of a three-part series. Read Part I and Part III. Part Two: The Structural Constitution The Basic Structure Suggested readings: One of the central functions of the Constitution is to structure the core institutions of government. In our constitutional system, this means the allocation of power between federal and state…
What does an LPE perspective imply for the practice of law? In other words, what is the “clinical wing” of LPE? My recently published essay, “Securing Public Interest Law’s Commitment to Left Politics,” seeks to denaturalize and politicize “public interest law,” arguing for a public interest law focused chiefly on building left political power by…
A primer on constitutional law from the perspective of political economy.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore has written that “we are faced with the ascendance of anti-state state actors: people and parties who gain state power by denouncing state power.” This tendency surfaced in the wake of the economic and legitimacy crisis of liberal capitalism in the 1970s, and has gained strength in the decades since, taking hold…
Funny thing about the intersection of tort and law and economics. For decades this school of thought has been ascendant in scholarship and intellectual understandings of this field, as it has throughout private law generally. No one can teach or write competently about torts without giving thought to law and economics fundamentals like cost-benefit analysis,…
