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LPE Originals

Recovering the Left-Wing Free Trade Tradition

Since the late 20th century, free trade has been defended primarily by neoliberals who cared little about social justice or democracy. However, a longer examination of free trade’s relationship to left-wing politics paints a very different picture. Recovering the history of those who defended free trade from the left may help us envision an alternative to the escalating economic nationalism we see today.

LPE Originals

Why Is Biden Endorsing Corporate Colonialism in Honduras?

A US-based, VC-backed company is suing the Honduran Government for shutting down the firm’s private, libertarian city-state. The lawsuit highlights how Investor-State Dispute Settlement provisions, written into US trade agreements across the world, allow corporations to extract billions of dollars from governments in the developing world for passing any regulation that might impinge on their profit margins.

LPE Originals

Upon the Conviction of the Villain Sam Bankman-Fried

Earlier this month, Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy. His conviction should not, however, be seen as any kind of victory. For the past three years, SBF successfully exploited a financial regulatory system stuck in older ways of thinking and increasingly incapable of averting illicit finance in the platform economy. To prevent such predation in the future, LPE scholars must help accelerate the turn to proactive planning, including via the day-to-day, direct supervision of major financial institutions.

LPE Originals

Economic Coercion in a Multipolar World

Once the near-exclusive prerogative of the United States, unilateral economic sanctions are increasingly a multipolar phenomenon. As Aslı Bâli has recently argued, this current conjuncture may offer a new window to resist forms of economic coercion that legitimate and enforce an unjust neocolonial global order. At the same time, however, there are new dangers inherent in the transformation of sanctions and related coercive practices into tools of open hegemonic contestation.

LPE Originals

Early Edition: (More of) the Best New LPE and LPE-Adjacent Scholarship

Some people head to the pumpkin patch. Others drink from the unholy fountain of the pumpkin spice latte. But here at the Blog, our favorite autumnal activity is decidedly less gourd-based: we scour the internet for the most exciting forthcoming LPE and LPE-adjacent articles. Covering tech, labor, housing, the administrative state, criminal justice, family law, religious freedom, finance, legal theory, and so much more, this scouting report is not to be missed.

LPE Originals

Weapons Against the Weak

Since the end of the Cold War, sanctions have served primarily as a way for relatively united Western powers — led by the United States — to impose their preferences on weaker states. The era of unipolarity that has facilitated such one-sided coercion is, however, drawing to a close, and with it perhaps the age of ever-proliferating sanctions.

LPE Originals

The Antinomies of “Peaceful” Sanctions

The legal concept and practice of “peaceful sanctions” is ridden with contradictions. To understand these antinomies, and to make sense of the changes in the legal treatment of sanctions over time, we must attend to the material basis of the international legal order – namely, a global but contradictory, crisis-prone, and conflictual capitalist imperialism structured along racial, gender, and spatial lines.

LPE Originals

Successful Failures: Economic Sanctions, Humanitarianism, and the Undoing of Post-Colonial Sovereignty

Humanitarian concerns have generally failed to bring about concrete legal limits on the use of sanctions as a tool of foreign policy. However, as the ongoing saga concerning the Afghan central bank’s assets indicates, they have succeeded in something much more fundamental: they have legitimized the use of sanctions as a tool for undoing and re-assembling the sovereignty of a postcolonial state.

LPE Originals

Sanctions’ New Colonizers

In this moment of U.S. financial imperialism, a host of “new” colonizers have emerged, including private plaintiffs holding unsatisfied civil judgments against so-called terrorists, terrorist organizations, and countries designated by the U.S. State Department as state sponsors of terrorism. And just as the colonizers of yesteryear used imperial policies to destroy and deplete the colonized’s resources, these new colonizers pillage in their own modern way, leveraging and expanding the U.S. government’s imperialist reach.

LPE Originals

The Opacity of Economic Coercion

At a time when human rights NGOs rigorously count civilian deaths in armed conflicts, no equivalent accounting is available to victims of a war waged via exchange rates, inflation, and interest rates. The opaque mechanisms through which economic coercion inflicts harm have made it difficult to identify causation, let alone to prosecute its agents under international law, while the rise of neoliberalism and an individualized human rights politics have led to a turn away from the concerns with economic coercion that animated post-colonial legal activism in the 1960s and 1970s.

LPE Originals

Economic Sanctions: Where LPE Meets Third World Approaches to International Law

To what extent do the very building blocks of international law enable the weaponization of economic asymmetry? How has the expansion of the U.S. financial system shifted the locus of economic coercion in the global order? And what possibilities exist for legal analysis and advocacy to contest such forms of imperialism? To answer these and other questions about the role of law in economic sanctions, this symposium draws together insights from scholars working at the intersection of LPE and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL).

LPE Originals

Renewable Power: Who Will Own the Clean Energy Future?

The IRA promises to pump billions of dollars into clean energy infrastructure, primarily though tax equity financing. This approach, despite its merits, all but guarantees that our clean energy future will be dominated by incumbent private actors, namely large financial institutions and private developers, who will capture the benefits of abundant low-cost renewable electricity.

LPE Originals

Tax Policy for a Climate in Crisis

How can a Law and Political Economy approach guide the power of taxation toward democracy, justice, and a livable planet? As a start, it can help us understand that tax policy involves not only the power to redistribute market earnings, but also the power to transform market governance.

LPE Originals

Who Is Risk Taking For? Banking in the Shadow of SVB

Silicon Valley Bank failed, in part, because it parked its cash in long-term U.S. government bonds. But why were Treasuries so attractive in the first place? One reason is that regulators assign the lowest possible risk-weight to U.S. government bonds. This favorable weighting does not, however, reflect a neutral assessment of actuarial risk. Rather, it reflects a policy choice to encourage banks to hold government debt. More broadly, risk-weights have long deviated from assessments of actuarial risks to encourage (or discourage) lending to particular sectors.

LPE Originals

Early Edition: (Some of) the Best New LPE and LPE-Adjacent Scholarship

With the spring submission season nearly in the books, and our Twitter feeds abuzz with placement announcements, the LPE Blog highlights some of the most exciting forthcoming LPE and LPE-adjacent articles. Covering tech, care, labor, criminal justice, religious freedom, money and banking, property, the administrative state, and so much more, this scouting report is not to be missed.