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.
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…
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…
It is common today to speak of a “crisis of democracy.” What do the rise of nationalism and populism, the renewal of socialism, and other recent developments reveal about twenty-first century democracy and its relationship to economic order, constitutionalism, and the rule of law? This course draws on political theory, political science, and legal scholarship…
Many of us came to law school interested in how the law can advance justice, only to find ourselves disoriented by a first-year curriculum seemingly uninterested in and often hostile to these questions. This syllabus is a suggestion of readings organized around the 1L Curriculum aimed to challenge various assumptions underlying the law. Instead of…
This syllabus was designed by Luke Herrine & Kate Redburn for the Yale Law LPE Student group. The purpose of this reading group is twofold: First, the group is intended to provide participants with a survey of major movements in 20th century American legal thought regarding the relationship between democracy, legal change and political economy,…
Law facilitates and enforces private transactions, enforcing contracts, encouraging competition, requiring disclosure. How does law construct “market” and how do market dynamics influence law? How might law and public policy be reformed to address concerns like inequality and corporate power, while promoting values like economic dynamism, inclusion, and welfare? This seminar explores these themes by…
Rival ideas about property rights and liberty are at the heart of the ways in which market economies are legally structured. However as Abraham Lincoln said: “We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing . . . The shepherd drives the wolf from the…
This yearlong lecture will, broadly speaking, cover introductory microeconomics and macroeconomics from a wide range of theoretical perspectives, including neoclassical, Post Keynesian, Marxian, feminist, and institutional political economy perspectives. The objective of the course is to enable you to understand the more “technical aspects” of economics (e.g. usage of supply/demand analysis within and outside neoclassical…