Skip to content
LPE Originals

Tax Havens: Legal Recoding of Colonial Plunder

By

The end of European empires during the mid-twentieth century and the independence of former colonies was many things: an oft-violent conflict between unequal opponents, a clash of ideas and ideologies, a struggle over rights and self-determination. Less frequently considered is that decolonization involved a dramatic movement of money and a legal reorganization of access to assets and investments. Having tracked these movements, I have found a surprising connection between decolonization and the expansion of tax havens and tax haven business during the 1950s and 1960s.
LPE Originals

Climate Change and Racial Capitalism

By

Despite the disproportionate impact of climate change on vulnerable populations who have been largely ignored due to their racialization, legal scholarship on climate displacement has often adopted a doctrinal approach that fails to analyze the underlying systemic causes of the climate crisis and its relationship to race and racism.
LPE Originals

Different Paths: Colonization is More than Exploitation

By

It is an exercise in futility to accept the legitimacy of colonial constructs such as race, gender, property, and state sovereignty, and then work to equalize relations defined in these terms. These constructs are, themselves, the “master’s tools,” designed to perpetuate relations of domination and subordination. Moreover, a more equitable division of the spoils of conquest, should that be possible, wouldn’t change the underlying power dynamics. This is because settler sovereignty has been defined precisely to prevent those under the state’s claimed jurisdiction from exercising self-determination, the right of all peoples to “freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.”
LPE Originals

The Algorithmic Capture of Employment and the Tertius Bifrons

By

Automated hiring systems are paradoxical. Although often the stated reason for adopting them is to curtail human bias, they frequently end up exacerbating the biases they’re meant to correct. Even as employment discrimination continues to morph with the introduction of new technologies, so, too, should the law change to meet it head to head.
LPE Originals

A Nightmare of Work and Care

By

At least since welfare reform, then, we have coexisted with a particularly monstrous work-life imbalance for low-income parents in which economic security, much less economic mobility for their children, remains forever out of reach. Americans have learned to live with punitive workfare as their only form of safety net assistance (or without it, as is the case for too many poor people ineligible even for subsistence benefits). Far from removing the crisis in care and work from polarized public debate, however, the pandemic has shown all too clearly that workfare ideology will not remain confined to the ever-shrinking welfare context, but has a life of its own.
LPE Originals

Introducing Guest Editors Angela Harris and Noah Zatz

By ,

Here at the Blog we’re trying out a new idea: inviting a rotating pair of “Guest Editors” to help steer our editorial process. Guest Editors will join our editorial board (scroll down) for six months at a time. Our first Guest Editors are Angela Harris, Distinguished Professor of Law at UC Davis, and Noah Zatz, Professor of Law at UCLA. In this post they introduce their goals.
LPE Originals

LPE on COVID-19 (vol. 5)

By

Dear Readers,  Today we’re bringing you a special Saturday edition of our ongoing covid-19 series. Take care, LPE Blog Your first stop after reading this post should be here, to listen to Amy Kapczynski and Gregg Gonsalves on The Dig podcast. They talk about how to survive this plague – the politics of public health and…
LPE Originals

Tracking Extraction

By

If “law and political economy” examines the role of law in constituting and regulating marketcraft and statecraft, one way of “doing” LPE is to look for the role of law in managing the processes by which capitalists extract value from activity putatively outside “the economy.”
LPE Originals

Exploitation Entrepreneurialism

By

NB: This post is part of a series in our Race for Profit symposium. Read all posts here. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s Race for Profit is an essential read not just for anyone interested in racism, housing segregation and post-Civil Rights era racial politics, but for anyone interested in understanding the American economy. It is impossible to understand contracts, property…
LPE Originals

Addressing Race and Gender Inequities at the Root of Housing Injustice

By

NB: This post is part of a series in our Race for Profit symposium. Read all posts here. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor demonstrates in Race for Profit, housing exclusion, instability, and segregation are all racialized in nature, and sewn into the very fabric of American institutions, policies, and value systems. During the height of redlining in the mid-20th century,…
LPE Originals

Predatory Inclusion: A Long View of the Race for Profit

By

NB: This post is part of a series in our Race for Profit symposium. Read all posts here. The ascending slope of our current housing crisis is a good vantage point from which to think about Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s new history of the federal response to an earlier point of crisis: she gives us reason to reconsider the role…
LPE Originals

How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership

By

This post is part of our Race for Profit symposium. Read all posts here. In Houston’s upscale Galleria-Uptown neighborhood, the mall known simply as “TheGalleria” is, according to its website, “Texas’ largest and most luxurious shopping destination.” A local real estate website confirmed the value of the location, pointing out that housing values in the neighborhood…
LPE Originals

Service Workers or Servile Workers? Migrant Reproductive Labor and Contemporary Global Racial Capitalism

By

This post is part of a series on Care Work. Read the rest of the series here.  Grassroots migrant worker activists, particularly those working as domestic workers or care workers, have characterized their labor experiences as “servitude,” “modern-day slavery,” and “bondage.” They use these terms to describe both their workplace conditions and the power dynamics…
LPE Originals

A Single Federal Usury Cap is Too Blunt an Instrument

By

In May 2019, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unveiled the Loan Shark Prevention Act, a bill that would cap the cost of consumer credit nationwide. Under the bill, the total cost of a loan, calculated as an annualized percentage rate (APR), could not exceed 15%. If fees and interest are capped at 15% APR, lenders cannot recoup the costs of making and servicing small-dollar, short-term loans. Only charitable or government-subsidized institutions could lend at that low rate.
LPE Originals

Teaching Penal Abolition

By

In April, the New York Times ran a profile on abolitionist visionary and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and the Harvard Law Review published an entire issue on prison abolition. This fall, the University of Texas Law School Human Rights Center is hosting a conference on abolition. The new journalistic outlet The Appeal runs abolitionist pieces…