This course explores the dynamic relationship between social movements and law, examining how movements for social change both shape and are shaped by law, policy, and deeper socio-legal transformations. Through the lens of critical legal theories, we also will interrogate the complex role of lawyers and legal advocates within social movements. Topics of focus include…

The global economic order is in flux. The Covid-19 pandemic, Russia’s war in Ukraine, rising tensions between the United States and China, and a more assertive and independent Global South have challenged long-held assumptions of global governance. Economic theories focusing on free trade and the power of independent markets have also come under criticism for…

This course explores the relationship between law and inequality. Our questions include: What role might law play in reinforcing and redressing different forms of inequality, including along lines of race, indigeneity, class, gender, sexuality, and disability? When is legal reform emancipatory and when does it maintain structural inequality? How might political and social movements seek…

At the turn of the twentieth century, a host of legal scholars developed innovative analyses of the relationship between law, democracy, and the economy. These scholars of political economy refuted laissez-faire ideas by showing that the state, with law as its instrument, necessarily constructed the rules of the marketplace. They also showed how forms of…

This seminar explores the institutional stakes of geography for economic opportunity and democratic representation, focusing on racial separation and subjugation in the United States. The first part of the course consider how law and policy help determine where people reside; the remainder explores how and why “place” matters. Many of our readings—which draw from public…

This course studies the law’s governance of care work. The care economy supplies basic needs for individuals and provides the human infrastructure for society. Care work often happens outside the traditional workplace and/or the formal labor market. Beyond the market, the family and the state also play essential roles in providing and paying for care.…

Much of legal scholarship and practice in recent decades has held politics and economics apart, abstracting away from or actively denying their interdependence.  Law schools and legal scholarship are organized along an implicit divide between “public” and “private” fields of law which is defined in significant part by the role that economics is thought to…

This seminar introduces students to the field of “Law and Political Economy” (LPE) and explores current topics in LPE scholarship. LPE scholars are a diverse group whose work cuts across subject areas and methodologies. Nevertheless, LPE scholars tend to hold that “the economy” and “politics” are deeply interdependent—and yet that much legal doctrine, legal scholarship,…

This 1L reading group is designed to introduce students to a range of work in law and political economy.  The reading group meets occasionally over the course of the year. As taught at NYU Law, it enrolls 12 first-year law students, and meets 4-6 times. There are no written assignments and the class is ungraded. After…

Mainstream development discourse and practice has not paid adequate attention to the institutional dimensions of development. Further, legal academic research in India has almost completely ignored the role of law and legal institutions in India’s development. The belated recognition of the role and significance of institutions means that questions such as what institutions are, how…

Once regarded as engines of benevolent innovation, or even as global emissaries of democracy, big tech companies have lost their reputational luster in recent years. Their rise coincided with a historic decline in government action against market concentration and abuse of dominance. But now the gloves are off. Since 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice…

The first half of the course will offer an introduction to the intellectual origins and basic tools of law and political economy.  The second half of the course will be based on a set of specific strategic interventions that will be selected for their political and social salience during the semester in which the course will be taught. 

Legal education generally relies upon two unsustainable demarcations: first, it separates law from politics and economics and, secondly, it treats legal fields (contracts, constitutional law, property etc) separately from each other. Generally speaking, private law is equated with ‘economics’ and public law with ‘politics’. These demarcations are neither intellectually rigorous nor practically useful. For that…

This reading group, adapted from a reading list prepared by Brian Highsmith, will explore the relationships between race, place, and the law. Our goal is, per Highsmith, to understand the “institutional stakes of geography for distribution…focusing particularly on racial separation and subjugation in the United States” and the commodification of urban space. “Our readings will…

The United States has a monopoly problem. Markets are increasingly concentrated across sectors, contributing to lower wages, higher prices, ballooning corporate profits, and political and economic inequality. In response, lawyers, policymakers, and activists are reimagining and reforming the legal foundations that undergird market organization. At the center of their focus lie antitrust law and regulatory…