Skip to content
LPE Originals

Twilight of the Gods

Contemporary proponents of law and economics claim to have abandoned the idea that law is an instrument for maximizing economic efficiency and wealth. Corporate law scholars haven’t yet heard the good news.

LPE Originals

The Dilemma of Picking Winners

Industrial policy will often require picking winners: if there were already many domestic firms capable of producing the desired output, there would be no compelling reason for subsidy or special treatment. Yet in doing so, the government risks locking in dominant firms and foreclosing the competition it ultimately needs. How might policymakers avoid this trap?

LPE Originals

Diversity as Value, Diversity as Risk

Corporate diversity practices, long celebrated for driving revenue growth and stabilizing stock prices, are now being targeted as liabilities by conservative shareholder activists, consumer boycotts, and litigation. This shift from rainbow capitalism to today’s anti-woke agenda reveals how diversity’s value in the marketplace has always been politically and legally constructed.

LPE Originals

Muskism as Fordism

Coined by a German economist in 1926, Fordism came to describe the dominant political-economic order of the mid-twentieth century. Could “Muskism” play a similar role in the twenty-first? How should we understand its distinctive regime of accumulation, and what kind of social contract does it propose?

LPE Originals

The Class Politics of the Feed

By targeting the addictive design features of social media platforms, K.G.M. v. Meta marks a breakthrough in product liability law. Yet the case also reveals a neglected class dimension: the harms of addictive platform design fall most heavily on those with the fewest alternatives. In addition to regulating these harmful products, we must build a world in which children do not so desperately need them.

LPE Originals

Banks Have Abandoned Their Public Purpose

At the core of the U.S. banking system is the public’s choice to delegate money-creation privileges to private actors. But what is the public getting in exchange? An ever-swelling suite of predatory credit products and few basic services. It’s time to reset the terms of the bargain.

LPE Originals

The Student Loan Conjuncture

While student loan repayment has resumed, stability is an illusion. Beneath the surface, mounting delinquency, administrative chaos, and the potential dismantling of federal loan management point to a deeper crisis in the governance of higher education finance.

LPE Originals

The Politics of Capitalist Legitimacy

At the core of Jason Jackson’s Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry is a longstanding conversation among Indian modernizers about how to identify and nurture the ‘right’ kind of capitalists. Yet this is not just an Indian story. Struggles over “good” and “bad” businessmen have structured political life in all capitalist societies, and the book’s deeper implication is that morality tales about virtuous entrepreneurs and predatory speculators are less descriptions of economic reality than prescriptive efforts to shape it.