JLPE – LPE Project

Not So Free to Contract: The Law, Philosophy, and Economics of Unequal Workplace Power

James Brandt — Thu, 13 Oct 2022 11:00:00 +0000

Running through the fields of employment law, philosophy, political science, and economics is the pervasive assumption that employers and employees share equal power. This assumption, which distorts employment law so as to undercut worker protections, contradicts common sense, as well as any reasonable interpretation of recent history. Despite notable gains in worker power over the past two years...

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How Governments (and Others) Should Present Complicated Information

Caroline Parker — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 11:00:00 +0000

Thanks to behavioral psychology, we know that people, including voters, will respond to information differently depending on how it is presented. For example, it turns out that we have different perceptions about the fairness of a tax system depending on whether the information is provided in terms of percentages or absolute numbers. Armed with this knowledge, should a government present...

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What Do Franchisees Do? Vertical Restraints as Workplace Fissuring and Labor Discipline Devices

James Brandt — Thu, 18 Nov 2021 11:00:00 +0000

In creating franchising, brands like McDonald’s, Jiffy Lube, and Dunkin’ Donuts developed a legal structure that hoards rents at corporate headquarters, by maximizing the flows of income to the brand while blocking participants in production from making claims on them. In my recent JLPE article, I describe in detail how franchisors deploy trademark and antitrust law to leverage market power in...

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Economic Law: Anatomy and Crisis

Caroline Parker — Tue, 16 Nov 2021 11:00:00 +0000

In my recent JLPE article, I consider the emergence of LPE against the backdrop of discourse about the concept of “economic law” dating back to post-war Germany. I advocate for a transnational turn in LPE that focuses on the relationship between public and private power in the context of state transformation and globalization. Like other problem-based depictions of a legal field—such as...

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Economic Democracy at Work

Caroline Parker — Mon, 15 Nov 2021 11:00:00 +0000

For the past four decades, U.S. corporate governance has followed a “shareholder primacy” model in which the maximization of shareholder value is defended as the sole goal. Under U.S. corporate and labor law, workers have no voice in major corporate decisions, including who to hire and how to compensate a CEO, whether to merge or acquire another firm, what kind of shareholder payments to authorize...

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Labor Governance in the Shadow of Racialized Mass Incarceration

Luke Herrine — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This post is part of a symposium highlighting the second issue of the Journal of Law and Political Economy. All of our posts highlighting releases of JLPE issue releases are here. “Going to the restitution center’s better than going to prison, I would think.” That’s how one judge justified a Mississippi program that forces people to work for private employers—from McDonald’s restaurants to...

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LPE in Europe as Critique of Ordoliberalism

Luke Herrine — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 11:00:00 +0000

The relevance of LPE for Europe might not be instantly obvious. LPE in the U.S. gets part of its conceptual thrust from its opposition to the dominance of Law and Economics, a framework that never achieved the same kind of intellectual hegemony in Europe. But there is a European parallel that could ground critique: the guiding role that ordoliberalism has played in the structuring of the supranational economy. But to get a grip on what LPE has to offer in a critique of ordoliberalism, we must first explore how left legal thought in Europe has engaged with ordoliberalism so far.

Milton Friedman’s Favorite Economy: Hong Kong in the Neoliberal Imagination

Luke Herrine — Wed, 10 Mar 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This post is part of a symposium highlighting the second issue of the Journal of Law and Political Economy. All of our posts highlighting releases of JLPE issue releases are here. Hong Kong was Milton Friedman’s favorite economy. From a first encounter in the mid-1950s, all the way through to the end of his life, the economist regarded Hong Kong as a kind of free-market utopia.

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The Road to Free-Market Family Policy

Luke Herrine — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This post is part of a symposium highlighting the second issue of the Journal of Law and Political Economy. All of our posts highlighting releases of JLPE issue releases are here. It’s well known that the United States is an outlier when it comes to how it expects families to provide the conditions, cash, and services their members need to thrive. Other wealthy democracies treat government as an...

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The Regulatory Roots of Inequality in the U.S.

Luke Herrine — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 11:00:00 +0000

The surge in US economic inequality since the 1970s was powerfully driven by politics and policy. Firms and individuals actively shaped market governance – from corporate governance to labor regulation – in their own favor and then took advantage of that favorable governance in the marketplace. This “inequality snowball” was particularly pronounced in the United States because firms were more aggressive in their business and political strategies and because the political system delivered more winner-take-all policy outcomes than the more consensual political systems of continental Europe and Japan.