The Harvard Law School Political Economy Association is a student organization run by JD, LL.M. and SJD students at Harvard Law School. The organization allies with the work of the broader law & political economy movement to deepen engagement with questions of social inequality and political economy at Harvard Law School. The Harvard group first formed after hosting the Global Inequality Symposium in Spring 2019 and was recognized as a formal student organization in Spring 2020. We have already built up a steady membership at the law school. We regularly organize academic events that center questions of redistribution in the study of core law school subjects, and questions of economic inequality more generally. We are allied with a host of other progressive student organizations at the law school that focus on matters of racial and gender inequality, labor rights, environmental justice, and social movement lawyering.
The flagship project of the Harvard group is the “Reclaiming Legal Education” initiative, an effort to build supplementary 1L and general law school curricula that bring questions about social justice to the forefront of legal doctrine, challenging the way inequality is embedded and taken for granted in the law. Towards this end, the Harvard LPE group has written an ‘alternative’ 1L curriculum that encourages students to question conservative, and efficiency-driven, doctrinal lessons. At present, we are working with students across law schools in North America to build up to an in-person workshop, the aim of which is to write a political-economy focused textbook for law schools. In the fall, we will also release a set of materials to help entering law students feel empowered about their education. Please visit our HLS website here, and find out more about our Reclaiming Legal Education project, including how to join, here.
