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LPE Originals

Planting an Orchard

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Through a progressive approach to designing policy feedback loops with communities and their organizations, we can create and win policies that both meet the immediate material needs and redistribute political and economic power more equitably.
LPE Originals

Carceral Feminism at a Crossroad

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In this watershed moment when policymakers feel liberated to embrace noncarceral responses to the behaviors that laws label crimes, one question rings out: “What about rape and domestic violence?” The pro-policing contingent intends this as a rhetorical “gotcha.” But many progressives open to meaningful reform genuinely worry about the demise of gender crime law, which they see as a formidable legal tool against the patriarchy.
LPE Originals

The Clean Sea Breeze of Bad Men

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This is part of our symposium on the legal representation of poor people. In Professor Hershkoff and Loffredo’s post contextualizing their comprehensive handbook within the LPE movement, we can detect a certain irony. As they acknowledge, many lawyers, particularly those trained at elite institutions, eschew the representation of low-income communities for a host of reasons amounting…
LPE Originals

LPE Praxis for Intergenerational Joy

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The question of how to put LPE into practice in legal services work naturally raises questions around methodology: who should elucidate and fulfill an agenda for life-affirming social change, and how should we go about it? More specific to lawyering, who should occupy the role of a lawyer fighting alongside her clients for racial and economic justice?
LPE Originals

Politics and Poverty Law

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This is part of our symposium on the legal representation of poor people. This past February, I was asked, along with several of my colleagues at CUNY School of Law, to remark on Helen Hershkoff and Stephen Loffredo’s forthcoming book, Getting By. This was a supreme honor, given my admiration for Helen and Stephen’s work…
LPE Originals

LPE in Practice: Why We Wrote Getting By

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This is part of our symposium on the legal representation of poor people. Students often ask how they can put “LPE into practice.” Earlier this year (before law schools went remote because of COVID), Professor Angela Harris spoke at NYU Law and addressed this question, emphasizing three key features of moving from theory to practice:…
LPE Originals

Last Week’s Surprisingly Deep Victory for LGBT Workers

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This post was originally published at Jacobin. Last Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity is prohibited by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The decision brings employment law in line with public opinion: a majority of Americans favor employment protections for LGBT…
LPE Originals

The Institutional Design of Community Control

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As the COVID19 pandemic and economic crises continue to ravage the country, it is increasingly clear that the virus is not just a public health challenge: it is also exposing deep systemic failures of governance, and disparities of political power. Black and brown Americans are the most likely to die from this virus, a reflection…
LPE Originals

The Bourgeois Internationale, Part I

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Mutant Neoliberalism is an excellent collection of essays canvassing what editors William Callison and Zachary Manfredi rightly diagnose as the changing face of neoliberalism – really, the multiplicity of national, transnational and post-national neoliberalisms – evolving in the aftermath of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Instead of a mortal wounding, the crisis generated the paradox, as several authors in the collection note, that neoliberalism’s failures led to more, not less, neoliberalism.
LPE Originals

Gideon and the Promise of Right to Counsel

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This week, we’re sharing two discussions on John Whitlow’s recently published article reflecting on New York’s right to counsel in evictions proceedings. Our contributors share visions of right to counsel that move beyond due process rights. The contributors show that right to counsel campaigns are part of broader movements that seek to address the material deprivation underlying the…
LPE Originals

Moving Beyond Liberal Legal Rights: An Expansive Vision of Right to Counsel

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This week, we’re sharing two discussions on John Whitlow’s recently published article reflecting on New York’s right to counsel in evictions proceedings. Our contributors share visions of right to counsel that move beyond due process rights. The contributors show that right to counsel campaigns are part of broader movements that seek to address the material deprivation underlying the…