How does American law treat transgender, genderfluid, nonbinary, agender, and gender- nonconforming people? What assumptions about gender operate in legal doctrines, and how do these assumptions interact with the lives of transgender people, especially those at the intersection of multiple axes of oppression? This seminar will discuss contemporary cases involving transgender rights, as well as…

Have you ever wondered what debt is, where it came from, and how it came to underpin American political economy? We’ll try to answer these questions and more in the Debt and Finance reading group. The group will meet on Zoom every two weeks to discuss readings on the origins of debt, the rise of…

This course will teach the principles of the lawyer as public citizen and the profession’s obligations to facilitate access to justice through a combination of readings,discussions, practice simulations, drafting exercises, and guest speakers. Major topics to be covered include the history of the provision of legal aid to the poor including the development ofcase law,…

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.…

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…

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?