The quest for “non-extractive finance” is filled with legal hurdles. This post examines how lawyers can support organizers working to imagine and build a better financial system.
Industrial agriculture is a major contributor to climate change, as well as a source of exploitation across the globe. Any just transition from fossil fuels must radically rethink current systems of food production and work towards reaching food sovereignty.
In theory, REDD+ is designed to be a win-win: it brings capital to economically struggling communities while ensuring that forests worldwide are protected for the good of the global community. Yet as theory of the Stranger King makes apparent, some colonialist approaches are softer and gentler than others — colonizing as invitees, rather than by force.
During the past decade the concept of a “just transition” has expanded far beyond its roots in the labor movement’s concern for protecting displaced fossil fuel workers. Should we welcome this expansion of the concept? Or will this generic use of ‘just transition’ undermine its usefulness as a framing device to guide policy and discourse?
Just Transition calls us to center questions of justice and distribution in the fight for an ecologically sustainable future. This call resonates deeply with the core concerns of LPE.
Neither Congress nor the Court have called for a one-size-fits-all approach to regulatory analysis, yet CBA continues to loom large in environmental policymaking. Agencies should reach for other tools that better capture the advantages and disadvantages of regulatory alternatives.
Two entrenched features of cost-benefit analysis ensure that the benefits of regulatory measures addressing climate change and racial injustice will be diminished and deformed in the process of valuing them: discounting and monetary valuation.
Anti-monopolists are right to worry about the concentrated power of institutional investors, but they are wrong to treat them as all bad. Common ownership presents an opportunity for the left to divide the interests of capitalists.
What the “deregulation” of electricity provision–and the ideology of marginal cost pricing that buttressed it–has to do with the catastrophic failures of electricity provision in Texas.
I follow Patricia Williams, Angela Harris & Aysha Pamukcu, in arguing universal rights, to basic income and other resources, are insufficient but necessary ingredients for justice. Indeed, I argue for permanent, non-discretionary funding of these rights. No one truly knows how much money the U.S. government spends encoding and encasing private property rights, much less private capital’s rights to coordinate or contract. In many ways, these costs are “baked into” society. So, ultimately, should it be for rights to income, healthcare, housing, education, employment for all.
UBI as part of the project of building collaborative security for all.
Despite the disproportionate impact of climate change on vulnerable populations who have been largely ignored due to their racialization, legal scholarship on climate displacement has often adopted a doctrinal approach that fails to analyze the underlying systemic causes of the climate crisis and its relationship to race and racism.
If “law and political economy” examines the role of law in constituting and regulating marketcraft and statecraft, one way of “doing” LPE is to look for the role of law in managing the processes by which capitalists extract value from activity putatively outside “the economy.”
Law and political economy is on a roll. The Law & Political Economy Project is about to host its inaugural conference. The Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and the Law has launched a journal dedicated to LPE scholarship. LPE student organizations at law schools across the country have sprouted. After two years, this…
Over the past four decades, the right wing has painstakingly built an intellectual scheme to try to justify the weakening of regulatory public health protections on the basis of neoliberal economic theory. But a couple of decades ago, when the EPA began to figure out how—at least sometimes—to beat them at their own game, that…
