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LPE Originals

A Crisis of Purpose in Public Defense

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That public defense is in a state of crisis is far from controversial. Crushing caseloads and rampant underfunding have created untenable working conditions under which even the most well-meaning defenders often struggle to effectively represent their clients. And yet, Jocelyn Simonson, in her important new book Radical Acts of Justice, identifies a deeper, more existential crisis facing public defense — not one of funding, but of purpose.
LPE Originals

(Some of) The Best New LPE and LPE-Adjacent Scholarship

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With the spring submission season nearly in the books, we highlight some of the most exciting forthcoming LPE and LPE-adjacent articles. Covering antitrust, legal theory, climate change, religion, disability, labor, consumer protection, criminal law, and so much more, this scouting report is not to be missed.
LPE Originals

Popular Justice Reborn? 

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The activists depicted in Radical Acts of Justice challenge the idea that criminal prosecutors represent “the People.” But where did that idea come from in the first place? By tracing the long shift in American history from informal, non-professional law enforcement to our current system of formal, bureaucratized law enforcement, we can better understand the terrain on which contemporary popular justice movements are waging their struggles.
LPE Originals

Radical Constitutionalism and a Critique of Nonviolence

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The most important work of legal scholarship in some time, Jocelyn Simonson’s Radical Acts of Justice raises, but does not develop, two major sets of questions. The first concerns the role of the Constitution in freedom struggles; the second, the legitimate role (if any) of violence in transformative left politics in the United States.
LPE Originals

“The Fuel for Everything”: Acts of Care as Sources of Hope

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At times, the possibility of aligning our formal systems of justice with our normative aspirations appears almost inconceivable. Yet we can locate some faith in justice and democracy by looking to the concrete acts of collective care taking place all around us. In this post, Jocelyn Simonson kicks off a symposium on her recent book, Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People Are Dismantling Mass Incarceration.
LPE Originals

The Demand for Transparency as Non-Reformist Reform

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The heuristic of non-reformist reform can help avoid ultra-leftism and create the possibilities for coalition, such as across groups who care about transparency. It can help us salvage the transformative potential of demands that seem to have lost their teeth. But to realize these ends without falling back into reformist pieties, the framework demands rigorous, context-specific thinking that eschews dogmatism.
LPE Originals

Abolition in the Interstices

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Within prison abolitionist movements and discourse, the idea of non-reformist reform often serves as a litmus test for assessing campaign goals and strategies. Yet even here, activists need to think holistically about their obligations and strategies, as pursuing non-reformist reforms will sometimes conflict with our duties to mitigate harm in the here and now.
LPE Originals

A Horizon Beyond Legalism: On Non-Reformist Reforms

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Today’s left social movements are increasingly turning to a framework of “non-reformist reform” to guide their efforts to build a just society. But what do non-reformist reforms require? How do they differ from liberal and neoliberal approaches to reform? And what role do law and lawyers have to play in advancing such reforms?
LPE Originals

Early Edition: (More of) the Best New LPE and LPE-Adjacent Scholarship

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Some people head to the pumpkin patch. Others drink from the unholy fountain of the pumpkin spice latte. But here at the Blog, our favorite autumnal activity is decidedly less gourd-based: we scour the internet for the most exciting forthcoming LPE and LPE-adjacent articles. Covering tech, labor, housing, the administrative state, criminal justice, family law, religious freedom, finance, legal theory, and so much more, this scouting report is not to be missed.
LPE Originals

Cruel, But Not Unusual, Market Foundations

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Private equity firms, cloaked under protective securities laws, have increasingly acquired companies that provide goods and services in U.S. jails and prisons. But it is the legal construction of prisoners’ rights that has enabled this market to take the particular form that it has, turning community ties into steady payment streams. In particular, Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, which has affirmed the constitutionality of pay-to-stay fees, has transformed the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment into a (subordinating) right to credit.
LPE Originals

RICO and Stop Cop City: The Long War Against the Left

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In the case against the Stop Cop City activists, the state alleges a criminal conspiracy among people who have distributed flyers, coordinated a bail fund, and performed legal observation of protests. These charges are outlandish and represent a terrifying abuse of state power, but they are hardly novel. As the case of Ray Luc Levasseur shows, RICO has a long history of being used as an expansive assault on leftwing radicals.
LPE Originals

The Maternal Control Complex

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In carefully chronicling the history, logic, and operations of the child welfare system and Tennessee’s fetal assault law, Dorothy Roberts and Wendy Bach give us accounts not of singular systems, but of something much more wide-ranging: an almost suffocating network of authorities surrounding marginalized mothers.
LPE Originals

The Deep Roots Linking Help and Punishment

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Throughout America’s history, the deep-seated idea that poverty is fundamentally a moral failing on the part of the poor has shaped social welfare policies and practices. If they could run their lives properly, the logic goes, they would not be poor in the first place. Accordingly, poor and non-white folks cannot be trusted to care for their children, and thus need to be coerced, through the threat of punishment, into forms of supposedly “therapeutic” state interventions.
LPE Originals

The Profits of Family Policing and Punishment

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When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton reportedly replied, “Because that’s where the money is.” To understand our current system of family policing and punishment, we similarly need begin from the idea that this is a profit-focused system, one that extracts resources by investigating, surveilling, prosecuting, and separating low-income families.
LPE Originals

Caring for Children by Punishing Parents

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According to the official organs of the family policing system, their goal is to ensure that children are safe and receive proper care. But a closer look at this system demonstrates just how little concern it has for the well-being of children. Instead, its primary purpose is to punish parents – a cruelty exacerbated by the fact that we live in a country that makes parenting nearly impossible.