Yearly Roundup: What We Published in 2023
A list of everything we published during this year of rest and relaxation.
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.
The Law and Political Economy Project and the Program on Law and Political Economy at Harvard Law School are pleased to invite proposals for an in-person gathering of Emerging Scholars that will take place from March 31 to April 2, 2023 at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Over the past several years, a growing…
Law schools are disorienting spaces, particularly for those who arrive seeking tools for justice and transformation. The basic 1L curriculum is steeped in our country’s history of settler colonialism and slavery, and the law taught in the first year largely constitutes a legal infrastructure that has fostered and protected racial capitalism. This symposium highlights how law clinics can disrupt that infrastructure and build toward emancipatory futures.
International law has a thriving critical scene, arguably bigger and more institutionally established than any other field. Yet political economy has been an unstable point of focus for critical international lawyers, in part because the justifications of the status quo in the international domain never coalesced into anything akin to a ‘21st-century synthesis.’ This picture of fragmentation and instability helps explain why Marxism provides a useful set of intellectual tools for approaching law, in particular, and social formations in general.
The modern disability rights movement has been primarily oriented around seeking labor inclusion through the expansion of civil rights statutes. Despite this, few disability theorists have approached the study of disability from an explicitly political economic perspective. Marta Russell, the author of several groundbreaking but lesser-known works on disability and capitalism, is one of the rare exceptions. This symposium celebrates her work and encourages the rediscovery of the political economy of disability.