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…
Environmental law has never felt so undemocratic. On nearly every aspect of environmental protection, the federal government is disconnected from the desires of its citizens. The best most citizens can hope for is that a still-distant election will produce a friendlier administration, one that will manage to embrace our priorities despite the immense influence of industry. There’s an irony beneath that sense of powerlessness, one that reveals a tragic flaw in modern environmental law. I want to both explore that flaw and introduce a tool from environmental law’s past that might help fix it. It’s a tool that entrusts ordinary people to decide: the jury.
In a recent video, “A Message From the Future,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s voiceover imagines a time when climate collapse has been averted. Now a seasoned member of Congress, she rides the bullet train to the Capitol. It’s a whimsical opening to a compelling narration. But it raises two important questions: first, will the Green New…
This post explores “extraction” as a keyword for analyzing the social and ecological world. Like “reproduction,” “extraction” has a Marxist pedigree, but it also carries at least four connotations that “reproduction” doesn’t. The first is non-renewability; the second is corruption; the third is waste; and the fourth is violence.
Economic policy must take seriously the social and ecological functions that have been treated as external to the economy altogether
The climate crisis demands substantial intervention in the economy beyond mere “market corrections.”
During their first weeks in the new U.S. Congress, U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her colleagues already have done something no other American political figure has managed for decades. They have got the whole country, and indeed much of the world, talking about massively transformative public investment as a real prospect. The ‘Green New Deal’ exceeds…
In the LPE community, issues of race, class, sexuality, and environment are sometimes referred to collectively as “social and ecological reproduction.” In this post and others to follow, I want to think about the place of the social and the ecological in “law and political economy.” As others have written on this blog, one of…
Building a popular environmental movement will take longer than suing the government.
