LPE Originals
Producing Subjects: Rethinking Productivity, Subjectivity, and Value Part 1
In part one of this series, Anastasia Tataryn interviews Susan Brophy regarding the importance of rethinking productivity, subjectivity, and value.
LPE Originals
Democratizing Governance to Advance Health Justice and Economic Democracy
The inequities and exclusions of the U.S. health care system are well known, but the two prevailing strategies in health law and policy—privatization and technocracy—both fail to address disparities in power that produce health injustices. To advance health justice, we need multiple pathways through which everyday people—acting both as individuals and also as member-led associations of patients, families, health care workers, and members of the public—can meaningfully shape governance and advance accountability by contesting over real levers of power. Many possible legal mechanisms incorporate empowered participatory decision-making and accountability into health governance. Here, I explore five mechanisms that hold especially exciting potential.
LPE Originals
Critiquing Legal Futurism and Imagining a Radical, Emancipatory Legal Liberalism
By
Robert Weber
The exact trajectory predictive legal analytics will take in the coming years is really anyone’s guess, but we can be fairly sure that the discourse of cost cutting and increased rationality via technology will be coming for the legal system, piece by piece. As such, it is worthwhile for left legal theory to take legal futurism, and even the idea of a legal singularity, seriously. Doing so, even for critics of liberalism, requires revisiting the liberal principle of the rule of law.
LPE Originals
The Two Faces of American Freedom, Ten Years Later: Part Three
In celebration of the tenth anniversary of its publication, Henry Brooks interviews Aziz Rana on his influential book and what it might teach us about the legacies of populism.
LPE Originals
The Two Faces of American Freedom, Ten Years Later: Part Two
In celebration of the tenth anniversary of its publication, Henry Brooks interviews Aziz Rana on his influential book and what it might teach us about the legacies of populism.
LPE Originals
The Two Faces of American Freedom, Ten Years Later: Part One
In celebration of the tenth anniversary of its publication, Henry Brooks interviews Aziz Rana on his influential book and what it might teach us about the legacies of populism.
LPE Originals
Overrating Under-determination; Underrating Capitalism (A Reply to Karl Klare)
By
Nate Holdren
Klare speaks to the virtues of post- and non-marxist social theory. My impression is that these literatures are long on the kind of disaggregation that the theory of underdetermination permits. Marxist critical theory tends to place more emphasis on aggregating, finding patterns. That kind of thought and past socialists who held to only minimally appear in Klare’s text and do so largely as foils. I would like to suggest that marxist social theory and the identification of patterns that persist over time – such as structural domination – is at least equally valid for left purposes and for understanding the relationship between law and political economy.
LPE Originals
How the Philly #HousingNow Encampment Movement Prompts Us to Reimagine a Right to Contract, Part 2
By
Madison Gray
In today’s post I explore how the success of those encampments presents a vision of contracting that counters the traditional Lochner-esque “freedom of contract” through the occupation and democratization of the right to contract which, under a commodified housing system, ultimately enlivens the right to housing.
LPE Originals
How the Philly #HousingNow Encampment Movement Prompts Us to Reimagine a Right to Contract, Part 1
By
Madison Gray
This summer, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the corresponding racial justice uprising, a coalition of unhoused people and organizers with the Black and Brown Workers Cooperative and the Workers Revolutionary Collective quietly hitched some tents in a park just off the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in downtown Philadelphia.
LPE Originals
What Makes An Administrative Agency “Democratic”?
Scholarship thus far has not reconciled the relationship between democratized agency policymaking and the regular lawmaking done by Congress. To ameliorate the inexorable agency costs, theorists generally pose two different solutions: (1) a democratization of agency discretion, e.g., by making notice and comment procedures more robust; or (2) forcing Congress to elaborate their intent in fine-grained detail or undertake more robust oversight. Both moves inadvertently replicate a conceptual mistake committed by many anti-administrativists. This essay will rectify this mistake.
LPE Originals
On Socialism and Critical Legal Theory
By
Karl Klare
A recent workshop on the “Jurisprudence of Distribution” invited the opening panelists each to provide a five-minute overview of what a contemporary approach within left legal theory might offer. Other speakers covered Critical Race Theory, Feminism, Vulnerability Theory, left political economy, and so on. I took socialism and critical legal theory. Here are my five minutes (with some slight modifications for bloggability).
LPE Originals
A Tribute to David Graeber
By
Luke Herrine
The importance of Graeber’s work goes well beyond money and debt. In my view, anybody interested in building up a renewed legal realism that can stand up to not just law-and-economics but also the updated formalism of liberal analytic moral/legal theory would be well served to familiarize themselves with his writings.
LPE Originals
Situating the Role of Democracy in LPE
One of LPE’s foundational commitments, as Sanjukta Paul reminds us, is that law constitutes markets – and that, as a result, we are free to constitute them differently. But this simply begs the question: how ought we constitute them? This is where political theory can be useful. As Sam Bagg points out, many LPE scholars already understand that democracy must have something…
LPE Originals
Socialism Past and Future (Part II of II)
In my last post, I began a discussion of the Weimar Constitution as one of the first constitutions containing provisions for social and economic rights (SER), and perhaps the very first one, in which socialists had an important hand drafting and expounding. The literature on constitutional SER misses a great deal when it casts the Weimar Constitution as a weak, infant version of later SER constitutions, which grew stronger over time.
LPE Originals
Socialism Past and Future (Part I of II)
Socialism is back. But what is socialism? We have forgotten a lot about what it meant in its salad days, a century ago. And what we have forgotten may include what might be compelling today.