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LPE Originals

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

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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?

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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

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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

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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

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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.
LPE Originals

How Free Trade Threatens Global Democracy

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As we debate matters of near-shoring, friend-shoring, and globalization, we must not forget the lessons of the recent past: from Argentina to India, the pursuit of open economies involved a brutal crack down on labor union resistance. In the process, many governments unleashed dynamics that now threaten the survival of democracy itself. Hope, though, can be found in the recent strengthening of labor movements globally, as well as the potential to bolster unions through industrial policy and the transition to a green economy.
LPE Originals

What the Telegraph Can Teach Us About the Moral Economy

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As we grapple with the law’s ability to address today’s most powerful corporations, one interesting yet largely forgotten set of cases can help us find our bearing: the “death telegram” cases. These suits involved claims for emotional distress against telegraph corporations for failing to deliver telegrams involving the death or illness of a family member. Astonishingly, nearly half the state courts that encountered these claims allowed them, in spite of the long-established common law rule that absent physical injury, mental anguish alone could not be recognized in law. This exception was justified, in part, because the companies were seen as “public service corporations” – a monopolistic business entity that controlled access to a vital public resource and had special emotional duties to its customers. What would it mean to revive such a conception of the corporation today?
LPE Originals

LPE and the Global Food Crisis

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Due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, food prices are higher in real terms today than at any point since the early 1970s. Yet it is the underlying political economy of the global food system that has created the conditions where hundreds of millions of people don’t get enough to eat.
LPE Originals

Bankruptcy as Social Safety Net

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By paying greater attention to who files bankruptcy, we can learn a great deal about the social and economic disparities that plague our society. By reforming and expanding access to bankruptcy, we can chip away at some of these disparities.
LPE Originals

Embedding Societal Values in International Law

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The existing system of international economic law is under great strain. This post offers a reading of the problem and proposes alternative directions for the future. In brief, the system has evolved from what John Ruggie called “embedded liberalism” to what David M. Trubek and I describe as “embedded neoliberalism.” The past couple of decades have witnessed something of a truce between those who designed the system and those who now are actors within it. But today this truce is largely crumbling.
LPE Originals

Advancing Equity in the Data Economy: The Case for International Taxation

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Companies and their investors extract large amounts of wealth from people’s data. Yet because tax law treats users of digital platforms as consumers, rather than producers, neither these users nor their home countries receive any compensation in return. How might international tax law be used to mitigate the harms of this exploitative arrangement?