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LPE Originals

What Do You Mean by Efficiency? An Opinionated Guide

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To ask “but what do you mean by efficiency?” can make one appear unsophisticated or pedantic. But that’s precisely the question we should be asking. Because there are good reasons to reject the notions of “efficiency” usually taught in 1L classes, even if — in fact, precisely because — we have good reason to value other forms of efficiency.
LPE Originals

LPE Field Guide: A Brief Reading List

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As we promised in our post on Monday, below is a list of recommended readings—mostly, but not entirely, from the blog—that helped orient us to the critical and constructive moves of LPE. Our choices are highly partial and subjective, and there is a vast literature on the Blog and elsewhere that can help to orient…
LPE Originals

K-Sue Park on How She Teaches Property

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This past semester, Emily Prifogle hosted a series of conversations on “Race and Property in Historical Perspective”. As part of that series, she talked with K-Sue Park about her article discussing how she teaches property. This conversation seems likely to be of interest to LPE-ers who teach or study property (and others!).

LPE Originals

Challenging Legal Education Through Student Activism at HLS

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At Harvard, institutional spaces for students to think about topics of law and justice remain limited, especially during the first year of law school when we are pummeled with work. While Harvard Law School has a rich history of student organizing, especially around teaching and academic appointments, we have had limited success in curriculum reform the last few years. When other students and I found the LPE movement and this blog, it felt like discovering room to breathe.
LPE Originals

LPE Student Organizing at YLS

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Over the past year, student organizing has become an important part of the Law and Political Economy Project. This week we’re highlighting the work of several LPE student chapters. We hope that by amplifying their work, we can reach more students at more law schools.
LPE Originals

Teaching Trusts & Estate as Critical Wealth Genealogy

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Step into a Trusts & Estates classroom and you’ll find the first thing most students learn is that the guiding principle in U.S. wealth transfer law is freedom of disposition. As the Restatement (Third) of Property tells us: “The organizing principle of the American law of donative transfers is freedom of disposition. Property owners have…
LPE Originals

Teaching Penal Abolition

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In April, the New York Times ran a profile on abolitionist visionary and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and the Harvard Law Review published an entire issue on prison abolition. This fall, the University of Texas Law School Human Rights Center is hosting a conference on abolition. The new journalistic outlet The Appeal runs abolitionist pieces…
LPE Originals

Contextualizing Contract Law: An LPE 101 Reading List

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Contract is, of course, part of the core legal infrastructure that makes markets possible. But it is more than that. As an ideal type, it is at the core of all individualist social, moral, and political theories that seek to account for human sociality while avoiding social structure. Contract represents the ideal of being able…
LPE Originals

Labor Relationships & and the Legal Vision of 1L Contracts

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Contracts is more than an area of law; it is a key piece of the vision we lawyers bring to many other areas of law. The 1L Contracts course supplies a foundation-stone of the “pre-analytic vision” with which lawyers will eventually think about many other things, including labor relationships. Labor regulation as such is addressed…
LPE Originals

It’s Mine, and Yours

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I teach in a law school where most students and faculty pride themselves on falling somewhere along a spectrum of progressive, extremely progressive, socialist, and left anarchist. Thus, every year, usually within the first month of starting my first-semester property law course, I find myself surprised that the vast majority of my students appear to…