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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

To Reimagine Intervention Strategies: The Political Economy of Domestic Violence

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In recent years, mainstream anti-domestic violence programs have moved away from a fixation on the criminal justice system to undertake economic justice initiatives designed to “respond to, address, and prevent financial abuse” related to domestic violence.  The shift reflects the growing realization that strategies of remedy through the penal state have tended to fracture the…
LPE Originals

Restorative Justice and Moral Neoliberalism

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Restorative justice is thus intriguing not only for how left organizers use it to advance prison abolition but also for how libertarian and conservative reformers have fashioned it into a tool of American neoliberalism. 
LPE Originals

Who are “the People” in Criminal Procedure?

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The customary case caption in criminal court, “The People v. Defendant,” pits the community against one lone person in an act of collective condemnation. When I was a public defender in New York City, it was common for judges, clerks, and other courtroom players to refer to individual Assistant District Attorneys as “the People,” as…
LPE Originals

Rethinking Criminal Law

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Energized and challenged by the rise of powerful grassroots movements in the wake of the Ferguson and Baltimore rebellions, law professors are rethinking how to teach first-year Criminal Law. At the Law and Society Association annual meeting this summer, Alice Ristroph convened a group to ask “Are we teaching what we should be teaching? .…
LPE Originals

Teaching Criminal Law from an LPE Perspective

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In the introduction to Chapter 1 of the casebook that Cynthia Lee and I edit, we tell students that the first-year course on criminal law answers the question, “What, in our society, makes a crime, and why?” We suggest that the answer involves “culture,” and that we therefore intend to approach criminal law as a…
LPE Originals

Law and Neoliberalism in Keilee Fant v. City of Ferguson, Missouri

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In my first post on Fant v. Ferguson, I introduced the case as a story about our racialized criminal justice system. The criminal justice story, however, represents only one layer of the onion. Like its fast counterpart, the slow violence experienced by Keilee Fant is embedded in a larger system of structural economic inequality that we call “poverty.”
LPE Originals

Criminal Justice and Slow Violence in Keilee Fant v. City of Ferguson, Missouri

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In a series of four posts, I’ll outline an approach to teaching law and political economy using Keilee Fant v. City of Ferguson, Missouri, a class action filed in federal court in the Eastern District of Missouri in 2015. In this first post, I explain how I use the complaint in Fant to frame a discussion of law, political economy, and the “slow violence” of the criminal justice system.
LPE Originals

The Movement for Black Lives Offers an Abolitionist Approach to Police Reform

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For several years, I have been thinking about the rise of racial justice movements that account for political economy—specifically, those with anti-capitalist commitments. I am thinking of the Movement for Black Lives, and aspects of the immigrant justice movement. These social movements mark the revival of anti-capitalist racial justice politics in the United States in…