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, Alaa Hajyahia, 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.
Throughout Spain, social movements are fighting against a chronic housing crisis caused by an influx of tourists and international capital. In this struggle, law is often a reflection of the existing neoliberal power structure, but with the support of sustained popular mobilizations, it has also served as a tool for emancipation.
Once hailed as a beacon of democratic hope, Tunisia has rapidly descended into autocracy over the past three years. The failure of its decade-long democratic transition offers crucial lessons for democracies old and new in this era of rising authoritarianism.
In a time of rising authoritarianism and neoliberal hegemony, movement lawyers understand that the law and legal institutions primarily serve to protect capitalism, rather than everyday people. Nevertheless, as this symposium will show, from Argentina and Brazil to Palestine, Spain, and Tunisia, movement lawyers are devising creative legal tactics in defense of democracy, pluralism, and self-determination.
The LPE Blog goes worldwide, bringing you some of our favorite global LPE and LPE-adjacent scholarship from 2024.
An interview with Chaumtoli Huq about the student uprising that overthrew Bangladesh’s government, the future direction of the country, and the lessons we can take from this moment.
Recent calls for the use of boycotts, divestment, and economic sanctions against Israel may seem to stand in tension with another position widely held on the left: the condemnation of economic sanctions as neo-imperial warfare. However, we can resolve this tension by recovering a central insight from the period of anticolonial lawmaking.
American courts exercise authority beyond U.S. borders, including over foreign governments, all the time. To most observers, this is simply a consequence of increasing economic globalization and legal modernization, which untethered jurisdiction from territory. But this is a mistake. Law has not become divorced from territory but instead actively remapped it; it has not merely responded to globalization, but actively produced it.
While governments in both the west and global south have become increasingly critical of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, these states have nearly all maintained normal trade relations with Israel. How should we understand this mismatch between political rhetoric and economic policy? And where might we look for signs of more material anti-imperial responses on the horizon?
The rule of law is inherently fragile, as law’s legitimacy ultimately depends on politics. Yet as demonstrated by the successful referendum in Berlin to expropriate more than 250,000 apartments from corporate landlords, this very dependence can empower democratic mobilization and redirect the conservative nature of the law towards a progressive future.
According to international law, third-party states have an obligation to block the transit of arms and jet fuel to Israel.
