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The Law and Political Economy Project
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: May 5, 2023

By LPE Editors

Sabeel Rahman on the Biden Administration’s overhaul of the regulatory review process, Yanbai Andrea Wang on the role of civil procedure in U.S.-China Relations, and Alex Wang on the benefits of empathy in comparative legal analysis. Plus, interviews with Julie Suk on her new book and Gabriel Winant on class composition in the 21st century, new essays by Molly Coleman, Aaron Benanav, and Tim Barker, and a student note that endeavors to analyze US election law through an LPE lens.
Announcement

What to Watch: The Thirteen Best Panels Streaming This Weekend

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Forget Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon. Over the next three days, you’ll want to turn that dial to Law and Political Economy: Labor, Social Control, and Counterpower. From the comfort of your own home, stream panels on the legal regulation of data and technology, socialist constitutionalism, decarcerating the welfare state, and so much more. Zoom links for the various panels can be found within this post, along with some paired blog posts from our (vast) archive.
Symposium

The Carceral Conjuncture in Central Appalachia

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As a result of jail and prison expansion in Eastern Kentucky, the region has become a center of gravity in the fight over the future of the carceral state. To understand this carceral boom, we need to appreciate how multiple crises have converged in Eastern Kentucky to produce a historical moment – a conjuncture – in which prisons and jails serve as putative solutions to a variety of social and economic problems.
Symposium

Disability and the Cisgender State

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In the escalating wave of anti-trans legislation and administrative violence sweeping the United States over the past several years, the credo on the left has often been that political violence against trans people is mere pretense: a right wing culture war meant to distract from issues more properly political-economic, or a cynical ploy to motivate a conservative voting base. This superficial reading is as naïve as it is dismissive of trans people’s material circumstances. What we need, instead, is a materialist critique that identifies state transphobia as dedicated to the broader neoliberal goal of dismantling public goods and modes of care in the name of cost reduction.

Essay

Labour Law and Political Economy

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As a field of law, labour law draws it legitimacy from its capacity to impose a stable order on a conflictual relationship of power and exploitation, and to institutionalize such order as one of justice between classes. Because of this function, labour law is and must be open to contestation and change by those affected by it, responsive to pressures not just for internal dogmatic consistency or external economic efficiency but also for human interests and demands for non-commercial social justice.
Symposium

The Making of a New Working Class

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What happens when the factory is gone and the working class has been rendered dispersed and invisible? In this post, Gabriel Winant kicks off a symposium on his recent book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America.
LPE Originals

Political Economy of Care Series

By LPE Editors

The LPE Project and the Global Health Justice Partnership (GHJP) are co-sponsoring a series of events on health, social reproduction, and crises of care. “Reimagining the Political Economy of Care” emphasizes the role of care work in sustaining and reproducing society, including our conceptions of gender, race, and ability. While centering the conditions of workers…
LPE Originals

Care as Labor, Care as Infrastructure

By LPE Editors

This is the first event in a year-long co-sponsored series between the LPE Project and the Global Health Justice Partnership on health, social reproduction, and the crisis of care: “Reimagining the Political Economy of Care.” “Care as Labor, Care as Infrastructure” When the Biden Administration included care in its proposals for new infrastructure spending, it…
Essay

LPE Field Guide: A Brief Reading List

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As we promised in our post on Monday, below is a list of recommended readings—mostly, but not entirely, from the blog—that helped orient us to the critical and constructive moves of LPE. Our choices are highly partial and subjective, and there is a vast literature on the Blog and elsewhere that can help to orient…
Symposium

Reconstructing the Algebra of Race and Rights

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I follow Patricia Williams, Angela Harris & Aysha Pamukcu, in arguing universal rights, to basic income and other resources, are insufficient but necessary ingredients for justice. Indeed, I argue for permanent, non-discretionary funding of these rights. No one truly knows how much money the U.S. government spends encoding and encasing private property rights, much less private capital’s rights to coordinate or contract. In many ways, these costs are “baked into” society. So, ultimately, should it be for rights to income, healthcare, housing, education, employment for all.