Is the power wielded by interests groups ultimately good or bad? To answer this question, we need to distinguish ordinary interest groups from super-groups, like the American Medical Association, whose legal empowerment makes them legitimate targets for democratic contestation and provides a principled basis on which to assess their political influence.
Religious liberty challenges to the Affordable Care Act often appear narrowly focused on exempting specific employers from covering particular types of care, such as contraceptives, sterilization, or gender-affirming care. However, closer examination reveals that such claims should be understood as a major new vector in the campaign against social insurance in the United States.
In the aftermath of Dobbs, EU institutions and leaders have started to mobilize to defend reproductive freedom. However, the EU’s current approach to abortion access – which regulates it through economic and human rights frameworks – not only contributes to a stratified system of care, but also risks privatizing and depoliticizing the issue.
Of the estimated 350,000 chemicals now on the global market, only a handful have been properly tested. And as the looming crises with forever chemicals and micro-plastics make clear, we are only just beginning to grasp the enormous toll that these novel entities are taking on human health. How did our environmental law allow this to happen? And what can be done to correct it?
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.
Nonprofit hospitals frequently deploy administrative hurdles to prevent low-income patients from receiving legally-mandated financial assistance. As a result, patients who should have qualified for assistance instead have billions of dollars of debt placed on their credit reports or sold to aggressive collectors. The IRS could mitigate this cruel practice by clarifying that hospitals are required to proactively screen patients for eligibility before issuing any bill.
In response to an expanding need for at home care, the state has established a highly bureaucratic system for delivering and compensating such assistance. This rigid approach to valuing care, in which needs are fragmented into easily quantifiable units, imposes under-recognized yet significant costs on workers and recipients alike.
With the spring submission season nearly in the books, and our Twitter feeds abuzz with placement announcements, the LPE Blog highlights some of the most exciting forthcoming LPE and LPE-adjacent articles. Covering tech, care, labor, criminal justice, religious freedom, money and banking, property, the administrative state, and so much more, this scouting report is not to be missed.
An alliance between religious and economic conservatives is playing a central yet overlooked role in the resurgence of concentrated economic power in America, resulting in the transfer of public funds, services, and decision-making away from more democratic institutions. Nowhere is this more evident than in the rise of “government-religious hospitals”: these hospitals are state owned, yet religion permeates their halls, and faith dictates the care they offer. To mitigate the risk that these arrangements pose, we must make innovative use of LPE’s tools, including antitrust, public utility regulation, and public options.
For the final contribution to our symposium on Marta Russell, Beatrice Adler-Bolton interviews Liat Ben-Moshe and Dean Spade about the connections between their work and Russell’s political economic analysis of disability and law. They outline how Russell’s work fits within Critical Disability and Legal Studies and explore what her critiques have to offer current movements for liberation and economic justice.
In the escalating wave of anti-trans legislation and administrative violence sweeping the United States over the past several years, the credo on the left has often been that political violence against trans people is mere pretense: a right wing culture war meant to distract from issues more properly political-economic, or a cynical ploy to motivate a conservative voting base. This superficial reading is as naïve as it is dismissive of trans people’s material circumstances. What we need, instead, is a materialist critique that identifies state transphobia as dedicated to the broader neoliberal goal of dismantling public goods and modes of care in the name of cost reduction.
The concept of reasonable accommodations at the heart of the ADA severely undercuts the efficacy of the law. Employers, public entities, and private businesses are allowed to ignore the inaccessible nature of their programs or activities until an individual with a disability seeks (or begs) for access. This reactive, individualized model does little to prevent mass-produced inaccessibility.
In her earlier work, Marta Russell called readers attention to the economy as a factor producing disablement and argued that we needed to re-embed the market in society, to tame businesses’ need to profit via the social policies of an interventionist state. By the end of her career, however, Russell had gone further, focusing on capitalism itself. Her solution expressed not a Polanyian ideal of a somewhat more egalitarian capitalism, but a Marxist aspiration to a vastly better and more egalitarian society, achievable only by ending capitalism through collective action.
When most people consider the crisis of American infrastructure, they imagine crumbling roads and bridges, decrepit schools and hospitals, or dysfunctional railways and power grids. This post calls attention to a different, often overlooked component of American infrastructure — public restrooms. Specifically, it argues for a constitutional right to public restroom access, grounded in state constitutional provisions dedicated to public health.
The late Marta Russell is not a well-known figure among legal scholars and practitioners. She should be. Running throughout her writings is a powerful thesis: in many respects, law works to enable profit-seeking, and disability, as a concept, is crucial to that work.
