This post is part of our symposium on Medicare for All. You can find all the posts in the series here. *** The early contours of the health care debate have featured a loose divide between those favoring so-called “single-payer Medicare for All,” and those who propose some kind of “public option.” To drill down to…
Legal scholars who care about how law creates wealth and power cannot afford to disregard the trust. As Katharina Pistor mentions in her recent book, The Code of Capital, the trust stands out as one of Anglo-American law’s “most ingenious modules for coding capital.” Trusts are a longstanding component of the “feudal calculus” that Pistor…
This post explores “extraction” as a keyword for analyzing the social and ecological world. Like “reproduction,” “extraction” has a Marxist pedigree, but it also carries at least four connotations that “reproduction” doesn’t. The first is non-renewability; the second is corruption; the third is waste; and the fourth is violence.
Economic policy must take seriously the social and ecological functions that have been treated as external to the economy altogether
The climate crisis demands substantial intervention in the economy beyond mere “market corrections.”
In the LPE community, issues of race, class, sexuality, and environment are sometimes referred to collectively as “social and ecological reproduction.” In this post and others to follow, I want to think about the place of the social and the ecological in “law and political economy.” As others have written on this blog, one of…
As a historian working in a law school, I think often about what history adds to the study of law and the training of future lawyers. Rarely does history provide an obvious road map to solving new legal problems, but it does at least two other things well: (1) it helps explain why the legal…
My earlier post on for-profit colleges discussed a special instance the limits that a neoliberal lens places on a progressive vision for higher education. In this post I discuss the more general phenomenon and an alternative approach to thinking about higher education. In doing so, I draw from a nascent project that Frank Pasquale and…
Betsy Devos’s Department of Education spent the summer finalizing its plans to defang Obama-era regulations strengthening consumer protection regulations of for-profit colleges. Undoing these regulations will keep federal funds flowing to companies that line investors’ pockets by imposing a lifetime of indebtedness onto working-class individuals under false pretenses. The ongoing challenges to their delay and…
On May 30, 2018 the Illinois legislature voted to ratify the ERA. Thirty-seven states have now ratified the sex equality amendment to the U.S. Constitution, just one state shy of the three-quarters required by Article V to validly amend the Constitution. Legal commentary following this news is primarily focused on questions about the amendment’s legitimacy,…
Our jurisprudence of sex equality imagines a world without prescribed gender roles in the family and the public economic and political spheres. Almost fifty years ago, the Supreme Court repudiated the “separate spheres” tradition, which confined women to role of unpaid caregiver in the family and home, while reserving breadwinning and public power to men.…
Paying for corporate tax cuts with revenue raised from grad students and universities sounds like a parody of a Republican tax bill. Unfortunately–like many seeming parodies these days–it was all too real. The tax bill that originally passed the House would have taxed both graduate student tuition waivers and university endowments above a certain level,…
