The New Trust Code

The New Trust Code

Legal scholars who care about how law creates wealth and power cannot afford to disregard the trust. As Katharina Pistor mentions in her recent book, The Code of Capital, the trust stands out as one of Anglo-American law’s “most ingenious modules for coding capital.” Trusts are a longstanding component of the “feudal calculus” that Pistor…

Contextualizing Contract Law: An LPE 101 Reading List

Contextualizing Contract Law: An LPE 101 Reading List

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…

Labor Relationships & and the Legal Vision of 1L Contracts

Labor Relationships & and the Legal Vision of 1L Contracts

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…

It’s Mine, and Yours

It’s Mine, and Yours

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…

The Racial Wealth Gap and the Question of Time Zero

The Racial Wealth Gap and the Question of Time Zero

Each year teaching Property Law, I have taught many of the big cases and topics on race and property law, such as M’Intosh and Dred Scott; segregationist turbulence in rights of reasonable access; public accommodations law; racially restrictive covenants; the Fair Housing Act. I never quite had a cohesive idea about this—they each seemed formative.…

Property Law as Poverty Law

Property Law as Poverty Law

I recently interviewed a man in a weakened rural town who makes sausages for a local meat packing business on the 3am shift. He told me about a homeless woman who had come to the meat shop one dark morning with blood-soaked hands. Delirious with cold and exhaustion, she had punched in the glass on…

Teaching from Narrative in Property Law – Part II of II

Teaching from Narrative in Property Law – Part II of II

In my last post, I argued that property law needs to tell new stories, and in doing so, a key benefit would be that we would “uncover” the relationship between property and equality.  In this second post, I will turn to another benefit to using narrative as a teaching tool–the ability to “frame” abstract concepts…

Teaching from Narrative in Property Law – Part I of II

Teaching from Narrative in Property Law – Part I of II

My teaching in Property Law is shaped by stories (if I am feeling fancy, I call them narratives). Whether true, false, or fictive (to borrow Carlos Ginzburg’s wonderful delineation), narratives enrich my teaching in property law because they offer a way to interrogate how property regimes manifest political, social and economic hierarchies within different societies.…

1LPE Round-up

1LPE Round-up

Earlier this fall, the LPE blog launched 1LPE, which aimed to provide a critical countervailing perspective on the doctrinal areas traditionally constituting the 1L curriculum. Take a look at what we’ve published – and get ready for more posts after the break!

1LPE: Mullane, Financialization, and Procedural Pliability

1LPE: Mullane, Financialization, and Procedural Pliability

Few cases were as difficult for me to initially grasp as Mullane v. Central Hanover Bank & Trust Co. (1950), a common case in first-year civil procedure courses. The appellant was a guardian ad litem, the opinion parsed the differences between jurisdiction in personam and in rem, and I woefully had never taken Latin. My…

Teaching Civil Procedure with Political Economy in Mind

Teaching Civil Procedure with Political Economy in Mind

Over a decade ago I wrote a short piece called “Poverty Law and Civil Procedure: Rethinking the First-Year Course [Poverty],” published as part of a symposium issue of the Fordham Urban Law Journal on the place of poverty in the law school curriculum. Reginald Heber Smith’s statement from 1919 was the epigraph: “The administration of…

LPE of Civil Procedure: Equality Inside and Outside the Courts

LPE of Civil Procedure: Equality Inside and Outside the Courts

What does civil procedure have to do with LPE? On the one hand, you might think of procedural rules as only instrumentally important. They don’t dictate our obligations, like tort law or criminal law, or define the terms of economic organization, like property law. But anyone wondering why procedure gets a prime place in the…