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LPE Originals

Writing a History of Marital Privilege in an Age of Retrenchment

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As the government seeks to erase the past injustices and achievements of marginalized groups, it is worth recalling how those gains were made. Parents, partners, students, and lawyers pursued a more just future at significant personal and institutional risk. Their courage offers a lesson for the present. At stake is whether this moment marks a temporary break in the long arc toward justice, or the beginning of a far grimmer chapter.
LPE Originals

When Nature is Worthless

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Under capitalism, the social domination of nature occurs through and is mediated by the commodity form. Certain portions of non-human nature can be valued, but only when they are transformed into commodities in the course of the capitalist production process. Other portions are not even commodifiable; the biological and physical processes subtending our existence are largely illegible to capitalist subjects qua capitalist subjects, and so are ignored or disdained even as they collapse.
LPE Originals

In the Shadow of Commodification

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While capitalism is typically said to commodify everything, much of what makes up our world isn’t commodified at all. It instead appears as a free gift: a social form that describes the condition of usefulness lacking value. The idea of the free gift can give us a deeper understanding of the environmental problems that plague contemporary capitalism. It can also help us better understand capitalism itself.
LPE Originals

America’s First Religious Public School?

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This past Friday, the Supreme Court granted cert in a case that concerns the first religious charter school in the United States. But this case is not merely about school choice or religious freedom — it also reflects a broader contest over how law structures public responsibility and private power.
LPE Originals

Making Families Great Again

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In the resurgence of family fortunes in recent decades, regressive tax cuts tell only half the story. Just as important were trust law reforms that helped family dynasts protect their new gains in ways previously thought impossible.
LPE Originals

The Political Economy of Abortion Law in the EU

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In the aftermath of Dobbs, EU institutions and leaders have started to mobilize to defend reproductive freedom. However, the EU’s current approach to abortion access – which regulates it through economic and human rights frameworks – not only contributes to a stratified system of care, but also risks privatizing and depoliticizing the issue.
LPE Originals

The Colleges are Alright

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Despite the outsized attention they receive, “Ivy Plus” schools are ultimately a footnote in the larger story of higher education. The American system, while stratified, developed in such a way that stratification does not forestall opportunity. To understand this situation, we need to look back at a (failed) crusade to restrict access to college.
LPE Originals

How Universities Exploit the Tax-Exempt Status of Campus Land

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Over the past few decades, universities have become some of the largest employers, real estate holders, health care providers, and even policing agents in cities and towns across the country. How did these educational institutions come to exert such power over their communities? One under-appreciated factor is the monetization of “non-profit” campus land.
LPE Originals

Seeing the University More Clearly

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Crisis can be clarifying. Recent events on campuses across the country have forced many of us to look more closely at how our own universities work, including at the decades-long drift toward more powerful university presidents. Reversing this drift, and developing a more democratic model of internal governance, may be a prerequisite not only for rebuilding intellectual community but also for avoiding future campus conflagrations.
LPE Originals

Should Higher Education Ratify Privilege or Public Service?

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Campus culture wars over DEI programs, gender nonconformity, and student debt cancellation might seem like distractions from the real problems facing higher education. However, they all tell us something important about the purpose of higher ed, because they all concern the central questions of hierarchy and its reproduction.
LPE Originals

The Fracturing of American Higher Education

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Despite the outsized attention afforded to a handful of elite, private colleges, most students attend public institutions within 50 miles of their home. The recent curriculum wars in different states, as well as disparities in state-level funding, mean that where one lives will play an increasingly important role in both the accessibility and content of higher education.
LPE Originals

The U.S.-Mexico Border as a Crisis of Social Reproduction

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Despite what you may have heard on Fox News or read in the New York Times, the crisis at the U.S. border with Mexico is neither about the border, nor about migrants’ impact on the country. Rather, the staging of a border crisis is an attempt by Republicans (and unwitting democrats) to put in place new machinery of social reproduction.
LPE Originals

The Care Bureaucracy

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In response to an expanding need for at home care, the state has established a highly bureaucratic system for delivering and compensating such assistance. This rigid approach to valuing care, in which needs are fragmented into easily quantifiable units, imposes under-recognized yet significant costs on workers and recipients alike.