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LPE Originals

Labor Relationships & and the Legal Vision of 1L Contracts

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Contracts is more than an area of law; it is a key piece of the vision we lawyers bring to many other areas of law. The 1L Contracts course supplies a foundation-stone of the “pre-analytic vision” with which lawyers will eventually think about many other things, including labor relationships. Labor regulation as such is addressed…
LPE Originals

Janus in Appalachia

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Many lawyers, scholars and activists on the left agree that the decrepitude of the New Deal framework, along with the Court’s unvarnished neo-Lochnerian constitutional attack on that framework, seem to require an alternative account of the Constitution’s bearings on labor law
LPE Originals

The Uneasy Case Against Occupational Licensing (Part 2)

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Successful ideological entrepreneurs change policy-makers’ focus and their presumptions. Those on the right, in particular, have been very effective at shifting attention from core confrontations of capital and labor to peripheral conflicts among laborers. We see this repeatedly in inequality policy, where fundamental tensions between capital and labor are ignored, obfuscated, or trivialized by a…
LPE Originals

The Uneasy Case Against Occupational Licensing (Part 1)

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Obama-era technocrats and Trump cronies may not agree on much, but they have made common cause against occupational licensing. That focus undermines important social objectives while obscuring far more important problems in the labor market. In this post, we cover the basics of licensing, and then reframe current attacks on it. In our next post,…
LPE Originals

Racism is at the Heart of the Platform Economy

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This post argues that race and racism are segmenting the new “on demand” labor markets, in ways that facilitate the transition to this new sector of the economy.  Scholars of racial capitalism have argued that modern capitalism could never have gotten off the ground without the violence of slave labor in the cotton economy. Violent…
LPE Originals

“Hey Google, What’s a Strike?”

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Yesterday morning, tens of thousands of Google employees walked off the job in Dublin, London, Singapore, Zurich, Haifa, Berlin, New York, Ann Arbor, and many other cities. The immediate spark for the protests was revelations that the company had given generous exit packages to a few executives credibly accused of sexual misconduct, including one accused…
LPE Originals

This Labor Day, A Clean Slate for Reform

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As divided as we have become as a country, we arrive at this Labor Day with a shared national understanding: both economic and political power are wildly out of balance, with dire consequences for the vast majority of Americans who find themselves on the losing end of this imbalance. Wherever we live, and however we…