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The Law and Political Economy Project
LPE Originals

Toward a Manifesto

By LPE Editors

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.

Symposium

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

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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?
Symposium

Dead Again? Mutant Neoliberalism and Crisis Reinvention

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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…
Symposium

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

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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…
Announcement

Inaugural LPE Project Conference – Call for Papers!

By LPE Editors

Call for Papers: “Law and Political Economy: Democracy After Neoliberalism” Over the past several years, a growing group of legal scholars have begun to center questions of “law and political economy” as part of a deliberate effort to enable a critical transformation in legal thought. Joined by the insight that the “the economy” cannot be…
Essay

Human Waste Management

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This post explores “extraction” as a keyword for analyzing the social and ecological world. Like “reproduction,” “extraction” has a Marxist pedigree, but it also carries at least four connotations that “reproduction” doesn’t. The first is non-renewability; the second is corruption; the third is waste; and the fourth is violence.
Essay

“A Place to Die”: LPE in the 1970s

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As a historian working in a law school, I think often about what history adds to the study of law and the training of future lawyers. Rarely does history provide an obvious road map to solving new legal problems, but it does at least two other things well: (1) it helps explain why the legal…
Essay

A Neoliberal Masterpiece?

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In our market supremacist era, is anyone allowed to bring their full self to the marketplace and the workplace?  Or must we all be “everywhere and only homo oeconomicus,” as Wendy Brown put it?  One of the more arresting aspects of the Supreme Court’s recent Masterpiece Cakeshop case is how neoliberal it isn’t. If neoliberalism casts us…
Essay

Partisan Warriors and Political Courts

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Thursday’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing was a stomach churning, nauseating affair. Christine Blasey Ford laid her life on the tracks, knowing full well that trains delivering important men can rarely be stopped. That was enough, but then came the turn: Brett Kavanaugh, partisan warrior. He tore into Democrats for a process almost entirely dictated by…
Essay

How Should Democrats Respond to the “Migrant Crisis”?

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In the wake of their recent defeat, Democrats’ natural tendency will be to concede the issue of immigration to Republicans and embrace cruelty-lite versions of their opponents’ positions — a strategy that is bound to fail. Instead, Democrats need to offer their own agenda for immigration and internal migration. To do so, they should look to institutional experiments from a forgotten past.