This syllabus is, in conjunction with the framing post on the Law & Political Economy Blog, a starting point for understanding the law and political economy approach to torts. The initial readings introduce both the law and economics perspective and the competing law and political economy perspective on tort. Subsequent portions of the syllabus use…
The law and political economy perspective is defined by its focus on power, the ability to control and change things (especially people). From the vantage point of law and political economy, courts, markets, legislatures, and all other institutions can and must be assessed in terms of how they create and distribute power. Because power exists…
I wrote a lot about Property between 2005 and 2010. I came to the topic as a new law professor because it struck me as something like constitutional law for the economy: the basic arrangement of power, cooperation, and legitimacy. The writing I did then was about how property law creates the terms on which…
Focusing on antitrust, this post explores how a modern law and economics might look, and highlights the diverse normative implications of state-of-the-art economics. As this post demonstrates, taking economics seriously is consistent with many different policy positions.
Energized and challenged by the rise of powerful grassroots movements in the wake of the Ferguson and Baltimore rebellions, law professors are rethinking how to teach first-year Criminal Law. At the Law and Society Association annual meeting this summer, Alice Ristroph convened a group to ask “Are we teaching what we should be teaching? .…
The empirical research we present in this post itself exemplifies how economics can be a powerful tool for examining (and not just assuming) the relationships between the formal structure of the law and the activities of economic exchange. As we lay out further in a subsequent post, legal leftists who fail to engage with the richness of academic economics miss out on many important insights.
There’s a lot for liberals to despair about these days and the Kavanaugh appointment sharpened several sources of that despair. After such an intensely partisan fight about the Court, and especially after the remarkable, norm-shattering partisan performance of the Justice himself at his final confirmation hearing, some of the liberal worry is inevitably focused on…
The struggle over Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination for the US Supreme Court and the subsequent horrible spectacle of the Senate hearings brought about a “genuine question” by a leading economist, Dani Rodrik: “how do we prevent ‘the Supreme Court has always been political’ argument from morphing into ‘judicial independence and the rule of law are political…
Judge Brett Kavanaugh, now very close to controlling the decisive vote on the Supreme Court, resembles other candidates for high political office. He has a constituency–the Federalist Society, anti-abortion activists, everyone who hopes to see Obamacare weakened and affirmative action ended–and other constituencies in opposition. Lots of money is being raised and spent for and…
The concept of economic competition is central to policymaking deliberation in this country. Yet even as our understanding of that concept evolves to take better account of corporate power, our thinking about competition retains a fundamental blind spot. Simply, the boundaries of the business firm insulate many instances of economic coordination that would be deemed anti-competitive…
Legal advocates have scored some major class-related victories in 2018. In January, an appellate court held that the administration of California’s money bail system violated the Fourteenth Amendment rights of indigent defendants. In February, the Fifth Circuit held Harris County’s money bail procedures unconstitutional on the ground that they keep the “poor arrestee” behind bars…
A durable progressive antitrust must invert the prevailing ideology and permit cooperation among workers (and the powerless in general) and condemn the consolidation and monopolization of capital
The concept of ultrahazardous activities, the creation of no-fault workers’ compensation and motor vehicle insurance, and the rise of mass tort litigation can all be partially traced to underlying technological changes and accompanying social shifts. In this post, I will use prior tort law revolutions as a springboard to discuss how new products liability law and fiduciary duties could be used to rectify this new power imbalance and ensure that IoT companies are held accountable for the harms they foreseeably cause.
Once upon a time, missing a payment on your leased car would be the first of a multi-step negotiation between you and a car dealership, bounded by contract law and consumer protection rules, mediated and ultimately enforced by the government. You might have to pay a late fee, or negotiate a loan deferment, but usually a company would not repossess your car until after two or even three consecutive skipped payments. Today, however, car companies are using starter interrupt devices to remotely “boot” cars just days after a payment is missed. In this post I’ll elaborate on how IoT devices empower companies at the expense of consumers and how extant law shields industry from liability.
Companies around the world are dreaming up a new generation of technologies designed to monitor their workers—from Amazon’s new employee wristbands, to Uber’s recording whether its drivers are holding their phones rather than mounting them. Technologies like these can erode workplace privacy and encourage discrimination. Without disregarding the importance of those effects, I want to focus in this post on how employers can use new monitoring technologies to drive down wages or otherwise disempower workers as a class.
