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LPE Originals

Socialism Past and Future (Part II of II)

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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

The Institutional Design of Community Control

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As the COVID19 pandemic and economic crises continue to ravage the country, it is increasingly clear that the virus is not just a public health challenge: it is also exposing deep systemic failures of governance, and disparities of political power. Black and brown Americans are the most likely to die from this virus, a reflection…
LPE Originals

The Bourgeois Internationale, Part II

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As I noted in my first post, it is possible that the COVID-19 pandemic will force a reckoning with the democratic deficit in the European Union and prompt a renewal of left-wing politics across the continent. However, the existing constitutional machinery of the five presidencies that make up the EU is both complex and considerably resistant to change, even (perhaps especially) in a crisis.
LPE Originals

Progressive Democracy and Legislative Form

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Adrian Vermeule recently made a stir with his proposal for a “common-good constitutionalism.” He argued that originalism had “outlived its utility” now that the right had gained power on the federal bench. Instead it was time for a “substantively conservative approach to constitutional law and interpretation.” We got only a few peaks at the substance,…
LPE Originals

Enriching the Narrative Economics of Public Options

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Inspired by Anne Alstott & Ganesh Sitaraman’s The Public Option, this post suggests that it is time to tell new stories about the nature and purpose of economic institutions, and that infrastructural investments should be put to work to ensure there is a world we can retire into.

LPE Originals

The Need for Neodemocracy

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We live in a neoliberal age. For ideological reasons bound up in the epic struggle against totalitarianisms both left and right, a bold experiment in hyper-liberalism took root in the wake of the Cold War. Allowing the democratic achievements and aspirations of liberal and social democracy to atrophy, intellectuals and policymakers began an audacious celebration…
LPE Originals

The Democratic Political Economy of Administrative Law

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The modern administrative state has always faced ongoing debates about the appropriate balance between administrative authority and procedural constraint. But this moment of debate is about more than just the familiar clashes between “big government” and “free market” visions of political economy. These attacks on the administrative state—and the historical and current efforts to (re)build administrative institutions—are a critical frontline for our substantive moral values of democracy, equality, and inclusion.
LPE Originals

Policymaking as power-building

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Many of the critical day-to-day governance decisions — from zoning to civil rights enforcement to worker protections, financial regulations, and consumer rights — take place within the administrative state. Without a greater degree of democratic responsiveness and accountability within the administrative process, these substantive rights are unlikely to be vindicated or equitably enforced. This means that policymakers and administrative law scholars alike need to start approaching the task of administrative institutional design with a greater attention to power disparities.
LPE Originals

Sex, Markets, and Political Economy

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Among the various perspectives utilized to understand sex work, a political economy approach directs attention to the fundamentally political and moralized nature of markets. Markets are not abstract spaces for economic transactions but rather politically contested terrains of societal struggle where competing actors wield technical legal tools and moralized beliefs in attempts to shape structures of societal governance.

LPE Originals

Critics of the Administrative State Have a History Problem

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For the first time in nearly a century, the conservative scholars, judges, lawyers, and advocacy groups challenging the constitutional foundations of the modern administrative state have reached a critical mass. However, by relying on originalist foundations, these critics may be inviting in a Trojan Horse. As I argue in a forthcoming article, returning to 19th century administrative law would smuggle in an unwelcome consequence: largely eliminating judicial review of the constitutionality of agency action. As a result, they may have to choose between their originalist attack on the modern administrative state and preserving a type of court review they value highly.
LPE Originals

The Tensions in Democracy: Interview with Astra Taylor

By LPE Editors

Astra Taylor is an independent writer, documentarian, activist, organizer, and musician. She recently completed a project on the concept of democracy, which produced both a movie–What is Democracy?–and a book–Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss it When It’s Gone. Both treat democracy as a paradoxical and tension-filled ideal that nevertheless must be fought for.…
LPE Originals

How Should We Think About Democracy?

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The concept of democracy is critical to the Law and Political Economy approach, yet its precise meaning is not always clear. On the left, “democracy” often functions as shorthand for the opposite of whatever has most recently earned our wrath: be it oligarchy or neoliberalism, marketization or regulatory capture, technocracy or inequality. Even when the…