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…
Instead of asking whether to maximize or divide scarce resources, legal analysis should ask how law defines the “pie” of societal well-being.
Should law maximize or divide the “economic pie”? Law students learn that smart thinking begins by asking this question. But this question skews legal analysis against a political economy perspective. It implicitly presumes a hierarchy where an abstract idea of economic gain normally stands above and beyond political and moral concerns, bigger in size and…
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…
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…
What would a 1L Contracts course look like from a law and political economy perspective? I can’t claim to have designed my course from the ground up to answer that question—and indeed I am intentionally more eclectic than that. Nonetheless, several of my choices—about how to thematize the material and what to include at all—clearly…
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…
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.…
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…