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LPE Originals

Predistribution and the Law and Economics of Income Inequality

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Law and Economics scholars argue that if income redistribution is to happen at all, it should occur exclusively through the tax system, rather than through supposedly less efficient methods, such as the minimum wage, collective bargaining, or housing regulation. Yet even by their own lights, these arguments fail: in many cases, predistributive policies are actually more efficient than the tax and transfer system. More fundamentally, to address economic inequality, we must move beyond narrow issues of distribution and transform the mode of production itself.
LPE Originals

Rebuilding State Authority In A Post-Trump America

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In the ruins of the administrative state after Trump, many on the left see an opportunity to design a New Deal-type reconstruction agenda. But building state capacity requires a government that is seen as legitimate, and it is precisely the erosion of legitimacy in the eyes of the public that has enabled Trump to carry out his deconstructive agenda.
LPE Originals

The Laws of the Market: A Response to Winant

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Antitrust law is important not only for its potential in reforming our current economic system, but also analytically, because of law’s irreducible role in structuring economic competition and coordination. Contra any picture of markets operating via quasi-automatic mechanisms, the organization and operations of any market are as much a product of contingent rules as any law of nature.
LPE Originals

Marxism and Antitrust: A Provocation

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How should we understand the relationship between Marxism and antitrust? To what extent do these traditions involve conflicting methods and assumptions? And, despite their differences, can we imagine a constructive give and take, where the two intellectual programs nonetheless align into a useful division of labor?
LPE Originals

Anti-Domination and the Future of Progressive Administration

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The Trump administration is simultaneously dismantling, weaponizing, and centralizing state capacities in order to enact a reactionary vision of administration — one which seeks to roll back efforts by prior generations to equalize economic and social relations. In contrast to this vision, progressives ought to aspire to a regulatory state whose purpose is to prevent domination. This alternative vision can guide us in deciding which forms of administrative power we should build and which we should actively work to restrain.
LPE Originals

From the Vault: LPE & Administrative Law

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A collection of our most illuminating posts on administrative law and democratic governance, featuring Sabeel Rahman, Karen Tani, Sophia Z. Lee, Kate Jackson, Daniel Walters, Blake Emerson, and more.
LPE Originals

The Political Economy of the Current Crisis

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The current constitutional crisis offers a new picture of what legitimate government looks like: rule by the boss, where professional civil servants become at-will employees, the threat of prosecution is just another bargaining chip, and statutory, constitutional, and ethical restraints are treated as tokens in a sucker’s game.
LPE Originals

How Antipoverty Advocates Can Go On The Offensive

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In the embers of the Supreme Court’s disastrous Grants Pass decision, a new form of necessity doctrine offers a ray of light. If private property owners’ exclusionary rights are meaningfully threatened, might the political will for ending homelessness and food insecurity finally emerge?
LPE Originals

On Writing Down Our Dreams During a Living Nightmare

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When it’s time to rebuild from the wreckage of the Trump-Musk rampage, the left may have the opportunity to implement a truly transformative agenda. However, unless we have relatively detailed proposals ready in advance, we will lose out to those who merely want to reproduce what came before.