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LPE Originals

The Law and Political Economy of Rural America

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If you read the New York Times or listen to certain economists, you’ve probably heard the following story: rural regions in America are economically unsustainable, irrationally resentful, and increasingly obsolete. An LPE lens can help us see why this narrative is mistaken. If we want to understand the story of rural America, we need to begin by examining the governing choices — the laws and institutions — that have disadvantaged rural communities. By revealing the human agency that shapes our collective fates, we can see that new and better possibilities remain within our collective control.
LPE Originals

When the Public University Is the Corporate Landlord

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This past month, the University of California announced a $4.5 billion investment in the Blackstone Real Estate Investment Trust. By partnering with one of the largest private landlords in the US, the University is directly contributing to and profiting from housing scarcity and tenant disempowerment. It is also betraying its public mission. As students squeeze into overcrowded dorms, or sleep in vans, tents, and closets, the hour has come for the UC to use its massive capacity to help solve the housing crisis, rather than prolong it.
LPE Originals

Reading the Post-Neoliberal Right

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Setting aside their habit of quoting Augustine, the post-neoliberal right can at times sound surprisingly like fellow travelers in their critique of the market. So how does their vision of life after neoliberalism differ from our own? And what does their arrival on the scene mean for the LPE movement?
LPE Originals

What’s Beyond “Beyond Neoliberalism”?

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Neoliberalism, we are increasingly told, has one foot in the grave. It is worth, then, thinking seriously about what comes next. What paradigms might replace it, or give it one more mutated form? One possibility, gaining attention in mainstream progressive policy circles, is what some call “productivism” or “supply side liberalism.” But will a focus on production really address the fundamental problems with our political economy? And to what extent does this supposedly new version of industrial policy move us beyond the governing vision that defined neoliberalism itself?

France illuminated at night
LPE Originals

Energy Price Shocks and the Failures of Neoliberalism

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The global energy price shocks of the past two years have made it painfully clear that energy cannot be treated as an ordinary commodity. They also offer an opportunity to rethink the push to liberalize energy markets over the past forty years, and particularly the use of markets for electricity provisioning.
LPE Originals

The Right to Counsel in a Neoliberal Age

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Over the past forty years, the Supreme Court has increasingly recognized the rights of defendants in criminal proceedings to exert autonomy over their own representation, including dispensing with counsel. Analyzing these developments in Sixth Amendment jurisprudence, this post argues that encoding defendant choice into constitutional rules will likely deepen, rather than mitigate, the structural inequalities at the heart of the criminal legal system.
LPE Originals

The Public Reliance on Private Toilets

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When most people consider the crisis of American infrastructure, they imagine crumbling roads and bridges, decrepit schools and hospitals, or dysfunctional railways and power grids. This post calls attention to a different, often overlooked component of American infrastructure — public restrooms. Specifically, it argues for a constitutional right to public restroom access, grounded in state constitutional provisions dedicated to public health.
LPE Originals

The Political Economy of Journalistic Objectivity

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Often lauded as the cornerstone of American journalism, the ideal of journalistic objectivity enshrined in corporate newsrooms primarily serves the bottom line, rather than an informed public. Fixing the industry’s misguided attachment to neutrality thus requires addressing its driving force: the economic incentives of news organizations.
LPE Originals

Labour Law and Political Economy

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As a field of law, labour law draws it legitimacy from its capacity to impose a stable order on a conflictual relationship of power and exploitation, and to institutionalize such order as one of justice between classes. Because of this function, labour law is and must be open to contestation and change by those affected by it, responsive to pressures not just for internal dogmatic consistency or external economic efficiency but also for human interests and demands for non-commercial social justice.
LPE Originals

The Economics of Reaction

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The economic style of thinking has undeniably constrained progressive ambitions. Yet this framing overlooks a secondary role that the economic style plays in political life: it provides cover for explicitly conservative and reactionary arguments by cloaking them in seemingly apolitical, technical expertise.
LPE Originals

Thinking like a President

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For fifty years, presidents of both parties have offered a vision of regulatory policy that takes the economic style of reasoning as its North Star. Republican and Democratic presidents have differed, however, in their willingness to sacrifice economic purity when it disrupts their larger policy agendas. While Republican administrations have tended to ignore this criterion when it doesn’t align with their political priorities, Democratic presidents have been more foolishly consistent.
LPE Originals

The ‘Economic Style’ as Red Scare Legacy

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The rise of the “economic style of reasoning” in the 1960s cannot be properly understood without attending to the political fallout of earlier decades. Institutional economists and social Keynesians did not just fall out of academic fashion or become irrelevant to the problems at hand. Instead, many were forced out of government or toward the political center by charges of disloyalty to the U.S. government.
LPE Originals

What Could Replace the Economic Style?

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The simple supply and demand curves that today’s policymakers learned in Ec 10 in the 1990s are guiding the highest levels of policymaking in various agencies and Congressional offices today. Given this troubling reality, should we seek to reform the economic style, so that it more accurately reflects the true benefits of government action, or should we attempt to side-step it entirely in favor of a “deontological style”?
LPE Originals

The Law and Political Economy of Religious Freedom

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As recent Supreme Court cases make clear, the libertarian and Christian wings of the conservative legal movement have orchestrated a two-step process to shift the allocation of public resources to private religious power. First, privatize public goods and services. Second, eliminate the distinction between religious and secular in the newly empowered private sphere. Their objective is to replace the New Deal settlement not with a libertarian vision of market freedom, but rather an arrangement in which the market is embedded in a conservative Christian social vision.