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LPE Originals

How Terrorism Torts Could Challenge Israeli Settler Violence

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Since the early 1990s, the United States has created a scheme of laws allowing private parties to sue individuals, organizations, and foreign countries for acts of terrorism in U.S. courts. While these laws have primarily been used to target and harass Palestinians, the recent spate of violence by Israeli settlers in the West Bank presents a potential if unexpected opportunity: to turn the tables on terrorism torts.

LPE Originals

Brandeis in Brussels: What American Reformers Can Learn from the European Union

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Neo-Brandeisian and other legal scholars generally associate Brandeis with America’s own anti-monopoly traditions. Yet Brandeis himself drew inspiration from developments unfolding across the Atlantic, and in contrast to Postwar America, where many of his institutional insights were eventually abandoned, the European competition regime has gradually gravitated toward an increasingly Brandeisian approach.
LPE Originals

Weapons Against the Weak

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Since the end of the Cold War, sanctions have served primarily as a way for relatively united Western powers — led by the United States — to impose their preferences on weaker states. The era of unipolarity that has facilitated such one-sided coercion is, however, drawing to a close, and with it perhaps the age of ever-proliferating sanctions.
LPE Originals

The Antinomies of “Peaceful” Sanctions

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The legal concept and practice of “peaceful sanctions” is ridden with contradictions. To understand these antinomies, and to make sense of the changes in the legal treatment of sanctions over time, we must attend to the material basis of the international legal order – namely, a global but contradictory, crisis-prone, and conflictual capitalist imperialism structured along racial, gender, and spatial lines.
LPE Originals

Successful Failures: Economic Sanctions, Humanitarianism, and the Undoing of Post-Colonial Sovereignty

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Humanitarian concerns have generally failed to bring about concrete legal limits on the use of sanctions as a tool of foreign policy. However, as the ongoing saga concerning the Afghan central bank’s assets indicates, they have succeeded in something much more fundamental: they have legitimized the use of sanctions as a tool for undoing and re-assembling the sovereignty of a postcolonial state.

LPE Originals

Sanctions’ New Colonizers

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In this moment of U.S. financial imperialism, a host of “new” colonizers have emerged, including private plaintiffs holding unsatisfied civil judgments against so-called terrorists, terrorist organizations, and countries designated by the U.S. State Department as state sponsors of terrorism. And just as the colonizers of yesteryear used imperial policies to destroy and deplete the colonized’s resources, these new colonizers pillage in their own modern way, leveraging and expanding the U.S. government’s imperialist reach.
LPE Originals

The Opacity of Economic Coercion

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At a time when human rights NGOs rigorously count civilian deaths in armed conflicts, no equivalent accounting is available to victims of a war waged via exchange rates, inflation, and interest rates. The opaque mechanisms through which economic coercion inflicts harm have made it difficult to identify causation, let alone to prosecute its agents under international law, while the rise of neoliberalism and an individualized human rights politics have led to a turn away from the concerns with economic coercion that animated post-colonial legal activism in the 1960s and 1970s.
LPE Originals

Economic Sanctions: Where LPE Meets Third World Approaches to International Law

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To what extent do the very building blocks of international law enable the weaponization of economic asymmetry? How has the expansion of the U.S. financial system shifted the locus of economic coercion in the global order? And what possibilities exist for legal analysis and advocacy to contest such forms of imperialism? To answer these and other questions about the role of law in economic sanctions, this symposium draws together insights from scholars working at the intersection of LPE and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL).
LPE Originals

Offset Frontiers, Fossil Capitalism and the Law

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The very idea of “offsetting” emissions requires the legal creation – and exploitation – of new sacrifice zones. Predictably, this approach has been a disaster for the environment. Less noticed, however, is the extent to which offsetting has warped the entire aim of environmental law.
LPE Originals

Analyzing China: The Role of Empathy in Comparative Law

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China has long been understood (and misunderstood) through the presuppositions and biases of the West. From canonical political philosophers, who have debated whether China represents an “oriental despotism,” to contemporary scholars who question the very existence of law in China, the study of the country is rife with analytical blind spots. But how can American legal scholars avoid such a fate? One underrated tactic is to adopt an empathetic approach, an openness to different possibilities in legal and non-legal ordering that does not take the necessity of formal Western legal institutions as a given. While an empathetic orientation does not preclude critique, it is a check against orientalist perspectives that see different laws, institutions, and cultures as self-evidently inferior.
LPE Originals

Civil Procedure in U.S.-China Relations

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In comparison with American courts, which increasingly adjudicate a narrow set of transnational cases, Chinese courts rarely forfeit authority over transnational cases. This development is reshaping the landscape of transnational litigation, as China’s appetite for taking on transnational cases calls attention to the advantages of exercising jurisdiction over a case — advantages that can dictate the outcome of cases in favorable ways, and which play an underappreciated role in the configuration of the international legal order.
LPE Originals

Toward a Postmetaphysical Approach to the Study of Chinese Law

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In a world where differences between the United States and China are increasingly amplified and weaponized, how can legal scholars study China fairly, insightfully, and constructively? Should we adopt a “metaphysical approach,” which holds that scholars can set aside their own value preferences and study other societies neutrally and objectively, or should we adopt a “postmetaphysical approach,” which presupposes a world marked by epistemic pluralism and casts comparative scholarship as inherently an exercise of discursive power?
LPE Originals

Labor Rights and the U.S.-China Relationship: From Neoliberal Consensus to Imperial Rivalry

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From the 1990s until the Trump presidency, political and economic elites on both sides of the Pacific held a largely uncomplicated enthusiasm for the re-centering of global supply chains within the borders of the People’s Republic of China. More recently, however, the U.S. federal government has resorted to a range of interventions to try to derail China’s ascendance, including, improbably, a newfound commitment to labor rights in China. By examining this trajectory, we can see why efforts to address labor exploitation will not succeed unless they transcend the narrow political vision engendered by the increasingly hostile U.S.-China rivalry.
LPE Originals

Marxism and China’s Effort to Build “Foreign-Related Rule of Law”

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Given its history, China is acutely aware of the hypocrisy of powerful countries speaking in the language of international law. Over the past two years, however, the so-called “foreign-related rule of law” (涉外法治) has gained enormous influence in Chinese official and academic discourse. While this turn is motivated, in part, by the China-U.S. rivalry, to fully understand the importance of this development, we must begin with a more basic question: why does a geopolitical power need law in the first place? And what kind of LPE-inspired approach is best suited to address this question?