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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…
LPE Originals

Money & Memory, Capital & Communion

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In their essence, monetary systems are all very simple. But that essence can be buried and hidden from view by accretions of practices over time. Money systems give rise to additional, ‘emergent’ properties as the groups that develop them grow in size and complexity.
LPE Originals

Law as the Code of Inequality and Wealth

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Katharina Pistor’s new book, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality, deserves to be the essential text of any movement today that concerns itself with law and political economy. It establishes, as its central topic, how fundamental law is to political economy, in the tradition of classical social theory but with a considerable update in light of contemporary affairs. And, more fully than anything else I know, it vindicates the LPE intuition that legal intellectuals have something essential to bring to the current and ongoing debate about markets and injustice.
LPE Originals

Imperium, Dominium, Terra

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In different ways, the seven legal scholars in this symposium all pose questions around description and prescription. Quinn Slobodian concludes the series by arguing that former supply the grounds for the latter – that what we see tells us what to do – and suggests what we are still missing.
LPE Originals

Many Neoliberalisms: Market Logic and Social Values

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This post is part of our symposium on Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Read the rest of the symposium here.  As many of the other contributors to this symposium have attested, one of the signal achievements of Globalists is the evidence that “neoliberalism” is indeed a coherent set of…
LPE Originals

The Procedure Fetish

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That’s the title of a new article of mine, slated for publication in the Michigan Law Review. It’s more polemical than most of my work, and it aims to disrupt some of the tidy stories that organize modern administrative law. Although I hope it finds an audience across the political spectrum, its primary target is…
LPE Originals

Contextualizing Contract Law: An LPE 101 Reading List

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Contract is, of course, part of the core legal infrastructure that makes markets possible. But it is more than that. As an ideal type, it is at the core of all individualist social, moral, and political theories that seek to account for human sociality while avoiding social structure. Contract represents the ideal of being able…
LPE Originals

“Law is Politics by Other Means?”: In Support of Differentiation

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The struggle over Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination for the US Supreme Court and the subsequent horrible spectacle of the Senate hearings brought about a “genuine question” by a leading economist, Dani Rodrik: “how do we prevent ‘the Supreme Court has always been political’ argument from morphing into ‘judicial independence and the rule of law are political…
LPE Originals

No Law Without Politics (No Politics Without Law)

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Judge Brett Kavanaugh, now very close to controlling the decisive vote on the Supreme Court, resembles other candidates for high political office. He has a constituency–the Federalist Society, anti-abortion activists, everyone who hopes to see Obamacare weakened and affirmative action ended–and other constituencies in opposition. Lots of money is being raised and spent for and…
LPE Originals

Political Courts and Democratic Politics

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The nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is on the knife’s edge. The stakes are higher than for the confirmation of any American judge in our lifetimes. For that reason alone, it is probably not a good time to stage a general debate whether and in what sense law is something more than…
LPE Originals

Partisan Warriors and Political Courts

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Thursday’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing was a stomach churning, nauseating affair. Christine Blasey Ford laid her life on the tracks, knowing full well that trains delivering important men can rarely be stopped. That was enough, but then came the turn: Brett Kavanaugh, partisan warrior. He tore into Democrats for a process almost entirely dictated by…
LPE Originals

Bias and Exclusion in Human Rights History

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In my brief rejoinder, I will focus on the criticisms for the sake of ongoing discussion — most of which reveal the biases and exclusions in the book’s coverage, when it comes to the past or the present. And I want to cop to those, clearly, totally, and upfront.