This is a short research course designed for aspiring movement lawyers and students interested in social justice issues. Topics covered include the legal research process and its limitations, critical approaches to conducting legal research, critical legal scholarship, and emerging legal research technologies and their shortcomings.
This course offers an introduction to Political Economy, followed by units on “Law, Economy, & Labor,” “Law & Money,” and “Law, Nature, & the Pandemic”
This course explores the relationship between social justice and lawyers’ ethics. It examines theoretical and practical questions related to the core duties of the profession. The focus is how these duties work in tandem or in tension with social justice commitments.
Law governs the workplace in myriad ways. Though many regulations concerning work are concentrated in the fields of employment and labor law (“ELL”), issues of workplace justice intersect with almost every legal field and subfield conceivable, from criminal law to environmental law to education law to immigration law to First Amendment law and beyond. This…
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…
The goal of this reading group is to consider the constitutive role of law in the value, production, and circulation of money, as well as its attendant impacts on inequality and economic injustice. In the first part of the course, participants will grapple with theoretical building-blocks for understanding the mechanics of the money supply and…
This seminar imagines the legal realization of radical hope. Contemporary social movements are insisting that another world is possible, and necessary. Complementing urgent efforts to resist or mitigate intense injustice in the present, bold visions for the future are on the table, if not yet around the corner: abolishing police and prisons, universal basic income,…
This course introduces students to the different avenues and theories public interest lawyers can utilize to conceptualize and achieve social change. Through bi-weekly readings, discussion, and reflections the course explores past, present, and future movement lawyering strategies and concepts, including aspects of the civil rights movement, prison abolition, and Afrofuturism. It examines the ways social…
This bibliography was developed collectively by the LPE Racial Capitalism Working Group which includes: Amna Akbar, Abbye Atkinson, LaToya Baldwin Clark, Veena Dubal, Carmen Gonzalez, Kaaryn Gustafson, Angela Harris, Cheryl Harris, K-Sue Park, Daria Roithmayr, Karen Tani, and Noah Zatz.
What are the affects of class and where does intimate labor fit into Marxist notions of use and exchange value? Is commodification and decommodification gendered? How does an intersectional perspective illuminate such processes as the wage? What is the sex of class and the class of pleasure? This graduate seminar explores that which economist and…
This seminar revisits the foundations of American Property law by examining its precepts and some seminal cases in the contexts of conquest and gentrification. More specifically, it explores the relation between historical processes of commodifying land in the U.S. and the creation of mechanisms for dispossessing and displacing the people who inhabit it. By examining…
We consider how technology has interacted with law, politics, ideology, and culture to bring us to our present state, and project these dynamics forward. We will consider whether technologies like robotics, platforms, or 3D printing will further exacerbate inequality, or whether they can be harnessed toward producing arrangements conducive to broad-based economic security. How do these interact with grand reform programs like a universal basic income or a universal jobs guarantee?
This class covers a range of poverty law issues. It begins with coverage of how poverty is measured, the major themes in poverty law, and the most important constitutional law cases. It then covers a number of specific issues: welfare, work, housing, health, education, criminalization, and access to justice. It ends by covering the relationship…
We will focus particular attention on three major themes of particular relevance today: speech, privacy, and power. The course has a particular focus on themes of corporate, governmental, and technological control of the Internet, and the effects on equality, free expression and user privacy. Course readings will highlight these themes and place legal developments in a broader theoretical context.
The Legal Construction of 21st Century Capitalism. How does law construct inequities of economic opportunity and power? How have changing ideas of political economy shaped law and public policy-and in turn, 20th and 21st century capitalism- over time? What are the normative and historical foundations for todays movements for structural racial and economic justice? What…