While current analyses of fascism tend to focus on interwar Europe, for George Jackson and other political prisoners, fascism represented the general tendency of the capitalist class to destroy revolutionary consciousness wherever it threatened the established economic order. On this view, rather than being a twentieth-century ideology, fascism was already present in the practices of colonialism and enslavement.
Throughout Spain, social movements are fighting against a chronic housing crisis caused by an influx of tourists and international capital. In this struggle, law is often a reflection of the existing neoliberal power structure, but with the support of sustained popular mobilizations, it has also served as a tool for emancipation.
Once hailed as a beacon of democratic hope, Tunisia has rapidly descended into autocracy over the past three years. The failure of its decade-long democratic transition offers crucial lessons for democracies old and new in this era of rising authoritarianism.
In a time of rising authoritarianism and neoliberal hegemony, movement lawyers understand that the law and legal institutions primarily serve to protect capitalism, rather than everyday people. Nevertheless, as this symposium will show, from Argentina and Brazil to Palestine, Spain, and Tunisia, movement lawyers are devising creative legal tactics in defense of democracy, pluralism, and self-determination.
An interview with Chaumtoli Huq about the student uprising that overthrew Bangladesh’s government, the future direction of the country, and the lessons we can take from this moment.
Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis’ new book, Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis, is both a polemic and a guide. Drawing on their experiences organizing with the Los Angeles Tenants Union, Rosenthal and Vilchis envision a world where tenants control housing – a liberatory horizon that legal scholars, lawyers, and law students alike have a clear role to play in reaching.
The blog post is never dead. It’s not even post. We reach into the vault and highlight some of our favorite posts on LPE and history, featuring K-Sue Park, Luke Herrine, Gabriel Winant, Johanna Fernández, Aziz Rana, Vanessa Ogle, Evelyn Atkinson, William Forbath and Joseph Fishkin, Claire Dunning, Beryle Satter, and Uʻilani Tanigawa Lum and Kaulu Luʻuwai.
Academic freedom, a key indicator of the climate of university life, has seen a sharp decline in recent years. This change has been driven by both state and market forces, and reversing it will require not only defending the university we have, but building the university we want.
What role has Law and Economics played in society and in legal scholarship? A Reply to David Bernstein’s recent critique of LPE.
The rule of law is inherently fragile, as law’s legitimacy ultimately depends on politics. Yet as demonstrated by the successful referendum in Berlin to expropriate more than 250,000 apartments from corporate landlords, this very dependence can empower democratic mobilization and redirect the conservative nature of the law towards a progressive future.
Boycotts and international sanctions both represent alternative means of lawmaking that challenge the liberal legal order. But while the disruptive potential of boycotts has largely been contained, international sanctions have evaded the constraints of international law. By looking to the social-movement roots of international sanctions, we might be able to imagine an alternative to today’s world of unfettered unilateral economic coercion.
While recent conventional wisdom has held that it is futile to organize voters around debt relief, a longer view reveals that there is nothing inevitable about the lack of debtor mobilization. Through the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, debtors repeatedly demanded protection in times of economic distress — a history that contains important lessons for our present moment.
While scholars have recently highlighted the role of law in democratic backsliding, they have largely ignored the actors who wield this tool: lawyers. Yet as the guardians of the legal legitimacy upon which autocratic legalism depends, the profession is a critical arena of democratic struggle that merits special attention.
The uncompensated work that law students perform to run the field’s journals is best understood as part of an economy of prestige: an opportunity to burnish one’s resume in hopes of landing a lucrative or high-status job after graduation. Among other problems with this arrangement, it leaves American legal scholarship vulnerable to repression. Recently, however, journal workers have begun to organize around the conditions of their labor – an effort that has the potential to transform the landscape of legal publication and, in doing so, contribute to a culture of increased solidarity in law schools themselves.
At both the state and federal level, there are legislative efforts underway to depict students, faculty, and the university itself as potential enemies of the U.S. national security state that must be disciplined and controlled. If enacted, these laws will upend how universities function, who they welcome, and how they teach their students.
