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…
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…
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.…
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!
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…
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…
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…
This is the final post of a three-part series. Read Part I and Part II Part Three: The Substantive Constitution Reconstruction, Freedom, and Nullification: The Battles over the Fourteenth Amendment In 1872, newly-emancipated and enfranchised black Republicans won a wave of elections throughout the country, including in Grant Parish, Louisiana. The election was disputed and…
This is the second post of a three-part series. Read Part I and Part III. Part Two: The Structural Constitution The Basic Structure Suggested readings: One of the central functions of the Constitution is to structure the core institutions of government. In our constitutional system, this means the allocation of power between federal and state…
A primer on constitutional law from the perspective of political economy.
What does political economy have to do with the issue of gender violence that roiled Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation? One answer is that law should not separate economics from the social inequalities that mediate power. Violent enforcement of social hierarchies has long been a core capitalist strategy for securing selective economic advantage, as Angela Harris…
The torts classroom is like a dystopian historical fantasy. Or maybe a kind of morbid historical science fiction. Students and teachers gather to rehearse time-honored rituals around the Great Cases of human tragedy: Scott v. Shephard, Brown v. Kendall, Rylands v. Fletcher, Vosburg v. Putney, Leroy Fibre v. Chicago, Milwaukee, & St. Paul Railway, MacPherson…
Funny thing about the intersection of tort and law and economics. For decades this school of thought has been ascendant in scholarship and intellectual understandings of this field, as it has throughout private law generally. No one can teach or write competently about torts without giving thought to law and economics fundamentals like cost-benefit analysis,…
This syllabus is, in conjunction with the framing post on the Law & Political Economy Blog, a starting point for understanding the law and political economy approach to torts. The initial readings introduce both the law and economics perspective and the competing law and political economy perspective on tort. Subsequent portions of the syllabus use…
The law and political economy perspective is defined by its focus on power, the ability to control and change things (especially people). From the vantage point of law and political economy, courts, markets, legislatures, and all other institutions can and must be assessed in terms of how they create and distribute power. Because power exists…
