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LPE Originals

Game Over: The End of Financial Regulation as We Knew It

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Many on the left continue to view cryptocurrency as little more than a grift. Yet the crypto industry aims to achieve something much more dangerous: functional monetary sovereignty. Their infrastructures create new conditions for exchange, wealth, and information. By ignoring these developments, we increasingly live in a dystopian world of monetary fiefdoms, and we find ourselves lacking the legal imagination to meet the moment.
LPE Originals

Inside the Failure to Regulate Stablecoins

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From legislative paralysis to regulatory fragmentation to strategic incoherence, Democrats have spent the past five years squandering opportunities to assert control over the future of digital currencies. To reverse course, progressives need to embrace a coordinated approach that balances innovation, privacy, and systemic risk.
LPE Originals

The Anarchist Currency with a Government Sponsor

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Despite its professed commitment to radical libertarianism and a non-state theory of money, the crypto industry is actively cultivating government intervention in markets on its behalf. From recruiting states to accept cryptocurrency for tax payments to pushing for the establishment of a Bitcoin reserve, crypto interests are partnering with the government to craft demand for currencies that hardly anyone uses.
LPE Originals

The Long Anti-Tax Tradition of American Oligarchy

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Throughout U.S. history, oligarchs have fettered the tax power of the state to ensure that the government would be too feeble to rein in their power. The Trump Administration’s capricious tariffs and mass firings at the Internal Revenue Service are the latest iteration of this long, anti-tax, anti-democratic tradition.
LPE Originals

The Economics of Sanctions: Why the U.S. Targeted Francesca Albanese

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On July 9, 2025, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese became the latest target of unilateral U.S. sanctions. These sanctions are an unjustified assault on Albanese, the United Nations, and international law. At the same time, they shed light on the true nature of unilateral sanctions — revealing what they aim to achieve and whose interests they ultimately serve.
LPE Originals

Why We Need to Stop Subsidizing Venture Capitalists

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From lending to stock trading to crypto, leading fintech companies have gained an edge not through actual technological innovation, but by using tech-driven narratives to obscure how they profit from bending and breaking financial regulations. What makes this especially troubling is that the public is propping up these firms by subsidizing Silicon Valley’s VC industry.
LPE Originals

On Tariffs and the Ends of International Economic Law

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For decades, the rules of international trade helped cement U.S. firms at the top of global value chains. Should Trump’s unapologetic embrace of tariffs be understood as part of a broader loss of faith in those rules among American policymakers? Or is it something else entirely — a bid to remake the relationship between capital and political power within the United States itself?
LPE Originals

Offshore Financial Law as Freedom-Promoting?

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In mainstream American discourse, offshore financial centers are generally regarded as transnational dens of iniquity, where wealthy individuals conceal their assets and attempt to evade taxation. Yet in some post-colonial jurisdictions, offshore financial law has also played an important role in promoting economic independence.
LPE Originals

The Not-So-Secret Lives of Trusts

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One common critique of trust law is that it exacerbates wealth inequality by creating layers of financial secrecy for families with substantial assets. Yet in facilitating the purchase of high-end real estate, private jets, and super-yachts, trust law also produces visible, even mappable effects on our physical landscape.
LPE Originals

The Anti-Democratic Rise of Super-Property

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Trust law, originally devised as a way to protect the assets of vulnerable parties, has undergone a wholesale transformation in the past half-century. It now primarily serves the rich by providing them with a new form of super-property, insulated from taxation, reporting requirements, and creditor claims. How did this perversion of trust law come about? And why did it confront so little democratic resistance?