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The Law and Political Economy Project

LPE Originals

CFP: Emerging Scholars in Law and Political Economy

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 Clinics and Racial Capitalism

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 and (the Critique of) Political Economy

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.

Capitalism & Disability: A Symposium on the Work of Marta Russell

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.

fat capitalist cartoon

Weekly Roundup: July 16, 2021

On Monday, Christopher Ali argued that the history of rural electrification has more radical things to teach us about expanding access to rural broadband than is commonly assumed. On Tuesday, Erika Wilson compared the reproduction of school segregation–and “white island districts” in particular–to monopolization of an essential facility, drawing out several policy implications. On Thursday,…

LPE Originals

LPE 101 Course: Law of Money & Banking with Lev Menand

The LPE Project is teaming up with the American Constitution Society (ACS) to offer an online course introducing students to LPE analysis. This course will pair lectures and short readings that illustrate how LPE frameworks can help us examine law’s role in the perpetuation of racial and gender injustice, the devaluation of social and ecological…

LPE Originals

LPE 101 Course: Law of the Platform Economy with Sanjukta Paul

The LPE Project is teaming up with the American Constitution Society (ACS) to offer an online course introducing students to LPE analysis. This course will pair lectures and short readings that illustrate how LPE frameworks can help us examine law’s role in the perpetuation of racial and gender injustice, the devaluation of social and ecological…

Liberalism, Property, and the Means of Production

In this post, we specifically consider liberal defenses of private property in the “means of production”. This focus allows us to put the liberal defense of private property into dialogue with Marxism, with which it shares a broad humanistic heritage and many particular normative framings. Our focus also connects liberal property theory with a variety of later critiques of private property in certain productive resources, including those of the progressive and realist lawyers who generated American doctrines concerning “public utility” and other modes of resource governance that are neither strictly “private property” nor strictly matters of state control.

Politics in, of, and through the Legal Academy: Akbar Interviews Matsuda, Part 1

Mari Matsuda is a central scholar within the critical traditions of legal scholarship: in particular Critical Legal Studies, Critical Race Theory, and feminist legal theory. Amna Akbar sat down with her virtually, on December 3, 2020, to ask some questions about her insights on where we are today, where we have been, and where we might go. Today’s part of the conversation focuses on the origins and the legacy of CRT.

LPE Originals

An LPE Approach to Constitutional Law w/ Jedediah Britton-Purdy

Join us for the third session of the LPE Project & ACS’s online course introducing students to LPE analysis. This course pairs lectures and short readings (from our own LPE Blog) that illustrate how LPE frameworks can help us examine law’s role in the perpetuation of racial and gender injustice, the devaluation of social and…

Different Paths: Colonization is More than Exploitation

It is an exercise in futility to accept the legitimacy of colonial constructs such as race, gender, property, and state sovereignty, and then work to equalize relations defined in these terms. These constructs are, themselves, the “master’s tools,” designed to perpetuate relations of domination and subordination. Moreover, a more equitable division of the spoils of conquest, should that be possible, wouldn’t change the underlying power dynamics. This is because settler sovereignty has been defined precisely to prevent those under the state’s claimed jurisdiction from exercising self-determination, the right of all peoples to “freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.”

LPE Originals

LPE 101 Course: Intro to LPE II with Angela Harris

The LPE Project is teaming up with the American Constitution Society (ACS) to offer an online course introducing students to LPE analysis. This course will pair lectures and short readings (from our own LPE Blog) that illustrate how LPE frameworks can help us examine law’s role in the perpetuation of racial and gender injustice, the…