Reflections from a clinical professor, on coming of age in the commonsense of neoliberalism.
In different ways, the seven legal scholars in this symposium all pose questions around description and prescription. Quinn Slobodian concludes the series by arguing that former supply the grounds for the latter – that what we see tells us what to do – and suggests what we are still missing.
This post is part of our symposium on Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Read the rest of the symposium here. “Commerce and Civilization!” These two terms formed the dual mandate popularized by Lord Lugard, the first British Governor-General of a united Nigeria. Despite its promise as being the encumbered, pure logic…
This post is part of our symposium on Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Read the rest of the symposium here. Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists has rightly received praise and critical attention as a groundbreaking study of the ideologies operative in the cloistered domains of international economic law. Indeed, the book has been…
This post is part of our symposium on Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Read the rest of the symposium here. As many of the other contributors to this symposium have attested, one of the signal achievements of Globalists is the evidence that “neoliberalism” is indeed a coherent set of…
This post is part of our symposium on Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Read the rest of the symposium here. Last month, the Supreme Court handed down a historic decision in Budha Jam v. International Finance Corporation, ruling that, under the International Organization Immunities Act (IOIA), international organizations are…
This post is part of our symposium on Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Read the rest of the symposium here. We have not yet seen the full story of “law and neoliberalism”, even though a number of legal scholars have written on related subjects from slightly different angles. Duncan…
This post is part of our symposium on Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Read the rest of the symposium here. ‘We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not’, proclaimed Tony Blair in 1999, possibly the high-point of (neo)liberal internationalism. In his masterful Globalists, Quinn Slobodian reconstructs…
This is the first of a series of posts on Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Read the rest of the symposium here. There are two recurring themes about neoliberalism and law. One of the themes (often voiced by the Right) is that neoliberalism has become a type of bogeyman,…
In the LPE community, issues of race, class, sexuality, and environment are sometimes referred to collectively as “social and ecological reproduction.” In this post and others to follow, I want to think about the place of the social and the ecological in “law and political economy.” As others have written on this blog, one of…
Successful ideological entrepreneurs change policy-makers’ focus and their presumptions. Those on the right, in particular, have been very effective at shifting attention from core confrontations of capital and labor to peripheral conflicts among laborers. We see this repeatedly in inequality policy, where fundamental tensions between capital and labor are ignored, obfuscated, or trivialized by a…
Obama-era technocrats and Trump cronies may not agree on much, but they have made common cause against occupational licensing. That focus undermines important social objectives while obscuring far more important problems in the labor market. In this post, we cover the basics of licensing, and then reframe current attacks on it. In our next post,…
The customary case caption in criminal court, “The People v. Defendant,” pits the community against one lone person in an act of collective condemnation. When I was a public defender in New York City, it was common for judges, clerks, and other courtroom players to refer to individual Assistant District Attorneys as “the People,” as…
Ruth Wilson Gilmore has written that “we are faced with the ascendance of anti-state state actors: people and parties who gain state power by denouncing state power.” This tendency surfaced in the wake of the economic and legitimacy crisis of liberal capitalism in the 1970s, and has gained strength in the decades since, taking hold…
My earlier post on for-profit colleges discussed a special instance the limits that a neoliberal lens places on a progressive vision for higher education. In this post I discuss the more general phenomenon and an alternative approach to thinking about higher education. In doing so, I draw from a nascent project that Frank Pasquale and…
