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The Law and Political Economy Project

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…

Inaugural LPE Project Conference – Call for Papers!

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…

Human Waste Management

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.

“A Place to Die”: LPE in the 1970s

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…

A Neoliberal Masterpiece?

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…

Partisan Warriors and Political Courts

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…

How Should Democrats Respond to the “Migrant Crisis”?

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.

The Unlikely Victors

The intellectuals of the neoliberal movement are best understood as the losers of societal change — rearguard protectionists who decided that rather than concede to democracy, they would subvert and delegitimize it.

The Rise of Neoliberal Public Finance

How did the American state come to be so extravagant in its recourse to public debt issuance, yet so selectively austere in its public spending choices? To answer this question, we need to understand how two rival schools of thought — Virginia school public choice and supply side economics — converged around the imperative to rein in the redistributive uses of public spending.

Weekly Roundup: June 29

Ntina Tzouvala on Genocide and Political Economy at the ICJ, Chloe Thurston and Emily Zackin on the long history of American debtor politics, and James Kilgore, Emmett Sanders, and Kate Weisburd on the many myths of electronic monitoring. Plus, Amy Kapczynski reviews Mehrsa Baradaran’s new book, Noah Zatz discusses the court order enjoining the UC grad students’ strike, Beatrice-Adler Bolton interviews Maryam Jamshidi about securitizing the university, Beatrice Cherrier launches a ten-part series on discounting, Gali Racabi shares a new open-access work law textbook, a new roundtable at Inquest looks at the role of prosecutors in dismantling mass incarceration, Tony Smith reviews a recent collection on Marxism and the Capitalist State, and the Progressive Talent Pipeline is looking for people to train and recommend for staff roles in Congress and government agencies. Could this be your year?