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The Law and Political Economy Project

A Labor Theory of Negotiation: From Integration to Value Creation

American negotiation theory started as, and for a long time remained, an engagement with labor and class relations. When early scholars developed their theories of negotiation in the context of workplace conflict, they did so in a moment when many workers were familiar enough with Marxist theories of class struggle to readily believe that some differences—for example, between management and labor—were not reconcilable, no matter how one performed in a negotiation. In this context, negotiation theorists aimed to open a space for potentially harmonious group relationships by introducing the concept of “integration”— the idea that labor and management could reorient their interests by creating new common values together.

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Weekly Roundup, September 25, 2020

This week at the blog… …we began a symposium on the deep problems with the criminal legal system. On Monday, Tariq El-Gabalawy introduced the symposium. On Tuesday, Marcelo López and Alejandra Gutiérrez discussed the intergenerational impacts of incarceration on their own families and communities and how that has guided their thinking through law school and…

LPE Originals

Law & Political Economy: Democracy Beyond Neoliberalism

Thursday – April 2, 2020 (Emerging Scholars Day) Session 1 Economic Rights (Raúl Carrillo, Zachary Manfredi, Jeff Gordon) Environmentalism (Ted Hamilton, Alyssa Battistoni, Ama Ruth Francis) The Corporate Form (Ioannis Kampourakis, Bharath Palle, Jay Varellas) Technology (Roel Dobbe, Sanjay Jolly, Dan Traficonte) Session 2 Trade & Labor (Pascal McDougall, Das Sannoy, Diana Reddy) Reimagining Subject…

The Deficit Myth: Banking Between The Lines

“Now, the rest is up to us because we are responsible for each other and to each other.  We are responsible to the future, and not to Chase Manhattan Bank.” –– James Baldwin This post is part of our symposium on Stephanie Kelton’s The Deficit Myth. You can find the full symposium here.  Several commenters have argued that…

A Nightmare of Work and Care

At least since welfare reform, then, we have coexisted with a particularly monstrous work-life imbalance for low-income parents in which economic security, much less economic mobility for their children, remains forever out of reach. Americans have learned to live with punitive workfare as their only form of safety net assistance (or without it, as is the case for too many poor people ineligible even for subsistence benefits). Far from removing the crisis in care and work from polarized public debate, however, the pandemic has shown all too clearly that workfare ideology will not remain confined to the ever-shrinking welfare context, but has a life of its own.

Introducing Guest Editors Angela Harris and Noah Zatz

Here at the Blog we’re trying out a new idea: inviting a rotating pair of “Guest Editors” to help steer our editorial process. Guest Editors will join our editorial board (scroll down) for six months at a time. Our first Guest Editors are Angela Harris, Distinguished Professor of Law at UC Davis, and Noah Zatz, Professor of Law at UCLA. In this post they introduce their goals.

LPE Originals

Origins of the Blog

The blog grew out of a group convened by Amy Kapczynski as a seminar in Law and Political Economy at Yale Law School in Spring 2017. The course emerged from a meeting with students who wanted a clearer view of the critiques needed to respond to the 2016 election, economic inequality, and the ascendance of neoliberalism. They…

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Weekly Roundup: July 24, 2020

This week at the blog… Ivana Isailović analyzed the political struggles over working from home through the lenses of social reproduction and workers’ control over their time, comparing policy responses in France and the U.S. and Katharine Jackson argued that LPE should borrow some analytical tools from political theory to separate out different ways of…

LPE Originals

Toward a Manifesto

This is a time of crises. Inequality is accelerating, with gains concentrated at the top of the income and wealth distributions. This trend – interacting with deep racialized and gendered injustice – has had profound implications for our politics, and for the sense of agency, opportunity, and security of all but the narrowest sliver of the global elite. Technology has intensified the sense that we are both interconnected and divided, controlled and out of control.

New ecological disasters unfold each day. The future of our planet is at stake: we are all at risk, yet unequally so. The rise of right-wing movements and autocrats around the world is threatening democratic institutions and political commitments to equality and openness. But new movements on the left are also emerging. They are challenging economic inequality, eroded democracy, the carceral state, and racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination with a force that was unthinkable just a few years ago.

Mutant Neoliberalism, Originary Violence, and Feminist Revolts in Latin America

In an interview, Michel Foucault said that when “actually existing” socialism was put in scare quotes, as if it were not exactly “real,” the only thing the scare quotes revealed was the strength of an abstract ideal that theorists invariably used as a measuring stick to evaluate, and theoretically marginalize, whatever was actually happening on the ground. What if we were to apply such an ironic qualification to neoliberalism?

Dead Again? Mutant Neoliberalism and Crisis Reinvention

Will the rise of new political forces and the explosion of global crises sound neoliberalism’s death knell? Or will ostensible challenges to existing political and economic orders instead catalyze new mutations in neoliberalism’s dynamic development? Mutant Neoliberalism, a recent edited collection, brings together leading scholars of neoliberalism—political theorists, historians, philosophers, anthropologists and sociologists—to rethink transformations…

Service Workers or Servile Workers? Migrant Reproductive Labor and Contemporary Global Racial Capitalism

This post is part of a series on Care Work. Read the rest of the series here.  Grassroots migrant worker activists, particularly those working as domestic workers or care workers, have characterized their labor experiences as “servitude,” “modern-day slavery,” and “bondage.” They use these terms to describe both their workplace conditions and the power dynamics…