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LPE Originals

Modern(izing) Indian Capital?

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Jason Jackson’s erudite Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry shows that, for more than a century, Indian firms labeled as “traditional” capital faced policy hostility, while those considered “modern” were more likely to receive favorable government treatment. Yet how should we understand the modernity of so-called “modern Indian capitalists”? Did Indian capital ever shed its identity as speculators and traders, or was this classification merely a way to block foreign competition?
LPE Originals

Capital Without Moral Cover?

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Jason Jackson’s Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry argues that capitalist societies develop a moral hierarchy of market actors, enabling certain firms to position their interests as good for society and thus deserving of regulatory protection. Though focused on India, the book also invites reflection on the recent return of patrimonial capitalism in the United States: is this merely an inversion of the prevailing moral hierarchy, or a post-moral turn in which firms no longer justify their privileged status in terms of a shared future?
LPE Originals

Moral Orders of Capitalist Legitimacy

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In today’s seemingly deglobalizing economy, policymakers across the world are in a quandary over how to regulate foreign firms. Should policymakers prevent foreign firms from attaining dominant market positions in order to prop up domestic industry? Or should they permit foreign firms to establish ownership and control of domestic markets in the hope of accelerating industrialization, economic modernization, and societal transformation? As Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry shows, such decisions are shaped by deeply institutionalized and highly contested moral beliefs about business actors and practices.
LPE Originals

When Workers Pierce the Corporate Veil: Brazil’s Forgotten Innovation

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In the early 20th century, foreign companies operating in Brazil would extract profits while using thinly capitalized subsidiaries to directly employ their workers. When things went wrong, workers were left with worthless claims while capital remained safely sheltered in the foreign-located parent companies. To address this issue, in 1937 Brazil adopted a novel legal innovation: imposing joint and several liability on parent companies for labor obligations. Recovering this history reveals that legal innovation often flows from the Global South, that limited liability is neither natural nor universal, and that seemingly technical corporate law doctrines are deeply entangled with questions of distribution, power, and sovereignty.
LPE Originals

Beginning with Empire

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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.
LPE Originals

LPE Without Borders: Lessons from the Global South

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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.
LPE Originals

Capitalism and Democracy: Always, Weimar, and Now

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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.
LPE Originals

The Economics of Sanctions: Why the U.S. Targeted Francesca Albanese

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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.
LPE Originals

The Authoritarian Commons: An Interview with Shitong Qiao

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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.
LPE Originals

On Tariffs and the Ends of International Economic Law

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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?
LPE Originals

Fossil Capital’s Regulatory Havens in the Caribean

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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.
LPE Originals

A Call To Defend Free Speech From Weaponized Allegations of Terrorism Ties

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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.