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LPE Originals

International Law and (the Critique of) Political Economy

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International law has a thriving critical scene, arguably bigger and more institutionally established than any other field. Yet political economy has been an unstable point of focus for critical international lawyers, in part because the justifications of the status quo in the international domain never coalesced into anything akin to a ‘21st-century synthesis.’ This picture of fragmentation and instability helps explain why Marxism provides a useful set of intellectual tools for approaching law, in particular, and social formations in general.
LPE Originals

Trans Emancipation Through Challenging the State

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With unrelenting devastation, the lives of transgender people are being targeted in prisons, streets, schools, and state capitals. This all-encompassing violence toward trans/queer people is often framed as a product of individual hate and transphobia, a cynical political ploy, or both. And the solution to such violence is often framed as recognition of trans identities by the state. Two new books by leading scholars of gender and political science broaden our understanding of the source of this violence, underscoring the degree to which it represents a defining feature of government and governing more broadly.

LPE Originals

A Conversation about Marta Russell with Liat Ben-Moshe and Dean Spade

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For the final contribution to our symposium on Marta Russell, Beatrice Adler-Bolton interviews Liat Ben-Moshe and Dean Spade about the connections between their work and Russell’s political economic analysis of disability and law. They outline how Russell’s work fits within Critical Disability and Legal Studies and explore what her critiques have to offer current movements for liberation and economic justice.
LPE Originals

Disability and the Cisgender State

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In the escalating wave of anti-trans legislation and administrative violence sweeping the United States over the past several years, the credo on the left has often been that political violence against trans people is mere pretense: a right wing culture war meant to distract from issues more properly political-economic, or a cynical ploy to motivate a conservative voting base. This superficial reading is as naïve as it is dismissive of trans people’s material circumstances. What we need, instead, is a materialist critique that identifies state transphobia as dedicated to the broader neoliberal goal of dismantling public goods and modes of care in the name of cost reduction.

LPE Originals

The Reactive Model of Reasonable Accommodation

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The concept of reasonable accommodations at the heart of the ADA severely undercuts the efficacy of the law. Employers, public entities, and private businesses are allowed to ignore the inaccessible nature of their programs or activities until an individual with a disability seeks (or begs) for access. This reactive, individualized model does little to prevent mass-produced inaccessibility.

LPE Originals

Moral Equality, Marxism, and Outraged Empathy

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In her earlier work, Marta Russell called readers attention to the economy as a factor producing disablement and argued that we needed to re-embed the market in society, to tame businesses’ need to profit via the social policies of an interventionist state. By the end of her career, however, Russell had gone further, focusing on capitalism itself. Her solution expressed not a Polanyian ideal of a somewhat more egalitarian capitalism, but a Marxist aspiration to a vastly better and more egalitarian society, achievable only by ending capitalism through collective action.
LPE Originals

Capitalism & Disability as Research Agenda

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The late Marta Russell is not a well-known figure among legal scholars and practitioners. She should be. Running throughout her writings is a powerful thesis: in many respects, law works to enable profit-seeking, and disability, as a concept, is crucial to that work.
LPE Originals

Capitalism & Disability: A Symposium on the Work of Marta Russell

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The modern disability rights movement has been primarily oriented around seeking labor inclusion through the expansion of civil rights statutes. Despite this, few disability theorists have approached the study of disability from an explicitly political economic perspective. Marta Russell, the author of several groundbreaking but lesser-known works on disability and capitalism, is one of the rare exceptions. This symposium celebrates her work and encourages the rediscovery of the political economy of disability.
LPE Originals

The Other Environmental Law: Climate Law’s Police Phase

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The adoption of fossil fuels to power the world economy has depended upon a fossil law that arranges a particular type of market and enforces a particular balance of power. One understudied, but central, aspect of this process is the use of state and corporate violence to compel the extraction and consumption of oil, gas, and coal.

A pinback button for the People's Church / Iglesia De La Gente. The background of the button is light blue. At center there is a yellow cross with white accent behind it. A black chain is on either side of the cross. Black text around the top reads [People's Church]. black text around the bottom reads [Iglesias De La Gente]. The back of the button has a metal pin with a clasp.
LPE Originals

The Young Lords: Building Power through Direct Action

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Creative and strategic militancies interrupt the normal functioning of society, shift the terms of debate in public discourse, and expand the definition of the common good. Never has this been more evident than when the Young Lords barricaded themselves inside The First Spanish United Methodist Church in East Harlem.