LPE Originals
Using Legal Tools to Bring Debt and Equity into Balance
The Fair Housing Act, as written, provides several tools to challenge inequitable urban development. Yet the courts have been reluctant to enforce the law.
LPE Originals
Living in a Capitalist City With No Capital
Elite white capital created housing for middle-class whites built by working-class whites. Nowhere in this process, nor in the profit of lending, the employment of housing construction, or the long-term appreciation of white homeownership, was there a meaningful place for African Americans to bridge racial economic inequality.
LPE Originals
The Same System, the Same Results
Every year, governments and public entities wrestle with tough decisions about how they will fund their communities, and every year we absolve Wall Street of its role in siphoning money away from our public budgets. Enough is enough.
LPE Originals
Making Public Debt a Public Good
Dependence on public debt is a hallmark of democratic capitalist governance. How, then, can we ensure that the interests of private investors do not overtake the needs of the people that debt is meant to serve?
LPE Originals
The Bondholders’ Veto: Fiscal Federalism and Local Democracy
American cities’ reliance on municipal debt must be understood as part of a larger structural reliance on concentrated, mobile capital.
LPE Originals
Histories of Hammers
Municipal bond finance is an important technology, but is it more like a hammer or an automobile?
LPE Originals
Public Money without Public Goods
By
David Stein
By documenting how public debt produced our present nightmare, Destin Jenkins allows us to dream about using public money to mend the ills of our era.
LPE Originals
The Myth of Fair Share/Equal Share Bond Projects
Los Angeles’s King-Drew Medical Center, a public hospital originally intended to provide Black residents with quality healthcare, is a cautionary tale about using bond financing to advance racial equality.
LPE Originals
Market-Based Law Development
To understand courts’ relation to the reproduction of economic domination requires close investigation of how they actually work for different types of litigants.
LPE Originals
School Segregation, Social Closure, and the Anti-Monopoly Analogy
In my new article, Monopolizing Whiteness, I examine the causes and consequences of “white island districts,” i.e. those that enroll predominantly white and affluent student bodies, despite being in racially and economically diverse metropolitan areas. I theorize that white student segregation in districts like GPSD is a product of (what sociologists refer to as) social closure— a process of subordination whereby an in-group works to curtail an out-group from accessing resources constructed as scarce. I suggest that the “essential facilities” framework of antitrust law can help to illustrate what a legal framework looks like that could appropriately recognize and address the process and harms of social closure.
LPE Originals
Jewishness as Property under Israeli Law
Understanding the law’s role in the project of Israeli colonization requires examining how distinct legal frameworks applied across a legally fragmented space can nevertheless share a common defining logic. One manifestation of this shared logic becomes evident by scrutinizing claims to land adjudicated by Israeli courts: Israeli state agencies and Jewish settler groups are treated as presumptively proper claimants of property while non-Jewish Palestinians are treated, at best, as dwellers who are not entitled to claim property but merely inhabit the land at the sufferance of Israeli authorities.
LPE Originals
On Using Private Law to Shut Down Private Prisons
How can we fight for accountability when privatization is designed to allow the government and private contractors to evade just that? A recent lawsuit—and the campaign behind it—points to one underexplored answer.
LPE Originals
System(s) of Domination: Historic Palestine as a Deeply Divided Space
By
Fady Khoury
In liberal-leftist discourses, both Zionist and otherwise, the pivotal year for what is called the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is 1967. Israel’s control over all aspects of Palestinians’ lives, both those who live within the ‘Jewish state’ and those who reside in the Occupied Territories, renders the 1967 paradigm not only unpersuasive, but ridiculous.
LPE Originals
Tax Breaks for Colonization?
By
Diala Shamas
Much attention has been rightly paid to the billions of dollars that the U.S. government hands over to Israel every year, regardless of Israel’s war crimes, or even the warnings of military and diplomatic experts’ that such support might harm U.S. strategic interests in the region. Less public scrutiny has been trained on the U.S. government’s indirect support to the Israeli settlement enterprise through the export of private actors, ideology and capital. But the colonization of Palestine has always been a multinational endeavor that extends beyond state-based support and that is inextricably intertwined with private forms of action.
LPE Originals
What Makes the Republic Neoliberal?
This post is part of our symposium on The Neoliberal Republic by Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France. Read all posts here. Like many other new shiny things, it ended with disappointment. Emmanuel Macron’s victory in 2017 was hailed as the advent of ‘le nouveau monde’ vis-à-vis the old political elites—a glimmer of hope in the…