The Association of Law and Political Economy invites proposals for its second annual meeting, to be held on June 9-10, 2027, in Boston, MA.
Recent calls for mandatory retirement in academia are a reminder that class and other social hierarchies are something like mountains with increasingly dense fog toward their peaks: the higher up one is, the less one understands that upon which and above which one stands.
As Sam Moyn has recently argued, “class reductionism” fails to explain differentiation along the generational gradient — a pattern clearly visible in economics, politics, and ideology. Yet a clear picture of how age mediates class would reveal not gerontocracy, but capitalism and the fractionated class system it produces.
Between 1917 and 1921, twenty-one states passed criminal syndicalism laws. These laws, which were intended to help eliminate the Industrial Workers of the World, have largely faded from public memory. Looking back, however, we can see a formula for anti-left repression that has proven durable and widely appealing: the limitation of political speech and organizing in the name of property protection.
The old school year is dying, and the new one struggles to be born: now is the time of movies.
This past February, hundreds of scholars converged in downtown Richmond for the inaugural Association of Law and Political Economy conference. As interest in the field grows, a larger question looms: can a loose coalition on the academic left turn shared critiques of the status quo into a durable movement?
Amna Akbar interviews Joe Soss and Joshua Page about how the criminal legal system extracts resources from the nation’s most oppressed communities and converts them into public and private revenues.
As New York’s Rent Guidelines Board weighs a possible rent freeze, the real significance of its annual hearings lies beyond the final vote. These public proceedings serve as a crucial engine for tenant organizing, building the collective power needed to overcome the real estate industry’s next wave of opposition.
What if the price you see isn’t the price, but your price? As personalized pricing and consumer profiling spread, hidden patterns of advantage and disadvantage threaten to undermine the shared conditions that make collective action possible.
The conviction of Anti-ICE protestors on terrorism charges represents a dangerous new front in the Trump administration’s war against the left. Yet it also highlights a longer history: over the past several decades, legislatures and courts have enacted a form of guilt by association that is antithetical to collective political action.
Unable to realize enough profit from their portfolios to repay their investors, landlords are turning the screws on tenants in the form of rising rents and declining conditions. Understanding this financial distress points us beyond questions of supply to a more nuanced analysis of the political economy of rental housing, revealing the market interventions needed to unlock tenant power.
Veena Dubal interviews Aziza Ahmed about the exclusion of women from early AIDS definitions, the feminist lawyers and activists who transformed the government’s response to the epidemic, and the adverse public health consequences of carceral feminism.
The whistle is sounding in Minneapolis. The question before the legal profession is whether we will hear it, amplify it, and act accordingly, or instead insist that the ground eroding beneath our feet is temporary and manageable.
When Congress eliminated taxes on overtime last summer, it framed the move as a win for workers. However, by encouraging people to spend more time on the job, the policy runs directly counter to the original purpose of overtime laws: to protect workers’ personal time and give them greater control over their lives. A better agenda would involve shortening the workweek, increasing the overtime premium, and banning mandatory overtime.
Federal courts have overwhelmingly rejected the Trump Administration’s radical expansion of mandatory detention. Despite this, ICE continues to arrest and detain tens of thousands of people each month, effectively nullifying judicial oversight through sheer scale.
