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?
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.
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.
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?
One in three Americans has a debt that has been handed over to a collection agency. Lawmakers continue to throw credit at the problem and punish borrowers when they struggle to repay. To escape this cycle, we need an approach to debt relief based on the principle of human dignity, a foundational concept in human rights law.
After a recent First Circuit decision, private creditors’ bankruptcy rights pose an existential threat to the only electric utility in Puerto Rico. As this outcome shows, we need a new approach to balancing the interests at stake in bankruptcy proceedings — one that protects private property, but not at the expense of undermining major public goods.
As neoliberal attacks on progressive taxation emptied public coffers, states and municipalities increasingly turned to fines and fees to generate revenue. More fundamentally, criminal punishment became a necessary correlate to a state that must enforce property rights against an ever-growing multitude.
The LPE Blog goes worldwide, bringing you some of our favorite global LPE and LPE-adjacent scholarship from 2024.
Recent calls for the use of boycotts, divestment, and economic sanctions against Israel may seem to stand in tension with another position widely held on the left: the condemnation of economic sanctions as neo-imperial warfare. However, we can resolve this tension by recovering a central insight from the period of anticolonial lawmaking.
In the resurgence of family fortunes in recent decades, regressive tax cuts tell only half the story. Just as important were trust law reforms that helped family dynasts protect their new gains in ways previously thought impossible.
American courts exercise authority beyond U.S. borders, including over foreign governments, all the time. To most observers, this is simply a consequence of increasing economic globalization and legal modernization, which untethered jurisdiction from territory. But this is a mistake. Law has not become divorced from territory but instead actively remapped it; it has not merely responded to globalization, but actively produced it.
How did Virginia School neoliberals transform the tax-collecting state into an engine of subtractive redistribution? How complete was their victory? And are they still winning in America today?
How did the American state come to be so extravagant in its recourse to public debt issuance, yet so selectively austere in its public spending choices? To answer this question, we need to understand how two rival schools of thought — Virginia school public choice and supply side economics — converged around the imperative to rein in the redistributive uses of public spending.
While governments in both the west and global south have become increasingly critical of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, these states have nearly all maintained normal trade relations with Israel. How should we understand this mismatch between political rhetoric and economic policy? And where might we look for signs of more material anti-imperial responses on the horizon?
Over the past decade, private financial markets – the domain of venture capital, private equity, and private credit funds – have grown to the point where they now dominate financial activity. This shift has undermined the protections afforded by existing securities laws and, because pensions are one of the largest contributors to these private funds, has subjected ordinary workers to the opaque, unregulated side of financial markets.
