U.S. attacks on alleged drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean have been widely condemned for violating international law. Yet much of this criticism, by focusing narrowly on the Trump administration’s military excesses, risks repeating a familiar mistake: debating how the United States wages war while leaving unquestioned why it wages it at all.
Law and political economy scholarship, immersed in a particular history of Northern law and capitalism, has tended to focus on US law and policy, with occasional excursions into Europe. But in a world where imperialist ideas and technologies tend to circle back to the metropole, and where the periphery appears to be the future of the center, the Global South has much to teach LPE about law, capitalism, and development.
In the current moment, it is not a crisis of capitalism that challenges democracy, but its triumph. For this reason, our political-economic situation is quite different from that of Weimar Germany, whatever continuities and similarities may exist.
On July 9, 2025, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese became the latest target of unilateral U.S. sanctions. These sanctions are an unjustified assault on Albanese, the United Nations, and international law. At the same time, they shed light on the true nature of unilateral sanctions — revealing what they aim to achieve and whose interests they ultimately serve.
Legal scholars must grapple with the emergence of a new state capitalism — defined by expanded modalities of statist intervention, growing state-held capital, and intensifying geoeconomic rivalries.
In the United States, homeowners’ associations are often a symbol of petty authoritarianism or suburban conformity. Yet in China these same organizations have become laboratories of democracy for millions of people. Jed Britton-Purdy interviews Shitong Qiao about how these associations form, why the Chinese government tolerates them, and whether they vindicate modernization theory.
For decades, the rules of international trade helped cement U.S. firms at the top of global value chains. Should Trump’s unapologetic embrace of tariffs be understood as part of a broader loss of faith in those rules among American policymakers? Or is it something else entirely — a bid to remake the relationship between capital and political power within the United States itself?
Offshore jurisdictions don’t just hide wealth — they enable the climate crisis by shielding the fossil fuel industry from taxes, environmental regulation, and political accountability. The Caribbean’s role as a hub for regulatory havens underscores the deep entanglement between colonial extraction, global capitalism, and environmental degradation.
When students, staff, or faculty are accused of being associated or “aligned” with terrorist organizations, universities may be pressed to take immediate and harsh action, if only to quell media attention and appear compliant with this lawless Administration’s wishes. Universities must prepare for this possibility, learn about the underlying legal frameworks, and refuse to operate on the basis of fear rather than legal necessity or moral principle.
The online targeting and harassment of the LPE Project’s Deputy Director, Helyeh Doutaghi, is part of a broader environment of speech repression, particularly of anti-war and pro-Palestinian views.
In mainstream American discourse, offshore financial centers are generally regarded as transnational dens of iniquity, where wealthy individuals conceal their assets and attempt to evade taxation. Yet in some post-colonial jurisdictions, offshore financial law has also played an important role in promoting economic independence.
Trust law, originally devised as a way to protect the assets of vulnerable parties, has undergone a wholesale transformation in the past half-century. It now primarily serves the rich by providing them with a new form of super-property, insulated from taxation, reporting requirements, and creditor claims. How did this perversion of trust law come about? And why did it confront so little democratic resistance?
Javier Milei aims to dismantle the welfare state and eradicate left-wing social movements. To what extent can the law stop him?
Rabea Eghbariah, Noura Erakat, Darryl Li, Aslı Bâli, Diala Shamas, Maha Abdallah, and Shahd Hammouri share their thoughts on how international law hinders Palestinian liberation, and how might it be used—or how must it transform—to contribute to it.
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.
