Traditional interpretations of the Genocide Convention construe the crime of genocide in notoriously limited terms. By contrast, South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ represents an effort to construct a historically-grounded and political economy-informed understanding of genocidal violence.
An interview with Vincent Bevins on what we can learn from the failed protests of the previous decade.
Sara Rankin on the most consequential homeless rights case in decades, Marshall Steinbaum on the material basis for the culture war over higher education, and Marc-William Palen on recovering the left-wing free trade tradition. Plus, so many upcoming events this excerpt simply can’t do them justice: Empire and Constitutional Law, Historical Approaches to Neoliberal Legality, Participatory Law Scholarship, Heterodox Economics Meets LPE, Digital Identity and Domination, Money-Empire-Law, and much else.
Daniel Morales analyzes the “crisis” at the US-Mexico Border, while Ganesh Sitaraman and Matthew Buck discuss the history of airline regulation. Plus, research grants from the HPE project, a CFP on labor and the law, Willy Forbath on the Taft Court, Zephyr Teachout on Netchoice, a new episode from Fragile Juggernaut, a conference on the future of work, and a last call to apply for the LPE in Europe Project’s Summer Academy.
A list of everything we published during this year of rest and relaxation.
Amna Akbar’s recent article on non-reformist reforms foregrounds a question that the LPE movement often bypasses: namely, how might systemic social change occur in the 21st century? However, in considering this question, the article erases nearly fifty years of theory-work, which has much to teach the legal left as it recovers the notion of non-reformist reform.
Within the LPE movement, there is a broad consensus that “law is central to the creation and maintenance of structural inequalities in the state and the market” and that “class power is inextricably connected to the development of racial and gender hierarchies.” These claims, while often articulated in response to neoliberalism, go to the very origins of capitalism and its particular patterns of inequality.
Though a familiar feature of legal education today, law clinics have a complex history. In the 1960s and 1970s, when student activists demanded curricular reform, law schools embraced clinics as a way to defuse the threat of student power. Looking back at this largely forgotten history helps illuminate the demands that were left behind, and demonstrates the need to reclaim the legacy of more militant student organizing.
In this essay, the author draws on his experiences as an incarcerated organizer to argue for the importance of a Black abolitionist politic that resists both “work” and the adoption of the “worker” identity. Instead, the category of the slave-in-revolt is better suited to the project of abolitionist organizing.
Given its history, China is acutely aware of the hypocrisy of powerful countries speaking in the language of international law. Over the past two years, however, the so-called “foreign-related rule of law” (涉外法治) has gained enormous influence in Chinese official and academic discourse. While this turn is motivated, in part, by the China-U.S. rivalry, to fully understand the importance of this development, we must begin with a more basic question: why does a geopolitical power need law in the first place? And what kind of LPE-inspired approach is best suited to address this question?
There is an urgent need to develop a genuine critical left internationalism to help think through issues related to China. Yet engaging this subject from an LPE perspective confronts two broad challenges. First, it requires bringing LPE concepts into conversation with debates regarding the diverse legal underpinnings of the global economic order. Second, it requires developing a left internationalism that embraces a non-U.S.-centric anti-imperialist position, moving beyond limited Cold War imaginaries.
One the CLS movement’s most significant contributions was the theory of law’s inherent tendency towards indeterminacy. Yet, despite broad agreement about its importance, the thesis itself is frequently misunderstood. This confusion arises, in part, because CLS put forward two very different approaches to formulating the indeterminacy thesis. We can, however, unify these two approaches by regarding indeterminacy as a kind of collective experience that legal actors produce as part of their interpretative work, and fight for as part of their shared political projects.
“Power over Life and Death: Feminism, Abolition, and the State“ Lauren Berlant 3CT Graduate Student Conference April 21-22, 2023 / University of Chicago Keynote Discussion: Sarah Haley and Sophie Lewis NEW Deadline for paper submissions: Friday, February 17, 2023 Two major events in the last few years have drawn renewed attention to ongoing crises in…
Neoliberalism, we are increasingly told, has one foot in the grave. It is worth, then, thinking seriously about what comes next. What paradigms might replace it, or give it one more mutated form? One possibility, gaining attention in mainstream progressive policy circles, is what some call “productivism” or “supply side liberalism.” But will a focus on production really address the fundamental problems with our political economy? And to what extent does this supposedly new version of industrial policy move us beyond the governing vision that defined neoliberalism itself?
From Antitrust to the Young Lords: a list of everything we published in the past year.
