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LPE Originals

In Defense of Grassroots-Powered Progressive Federalism

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Rather than serving as an obstacle to progressive change, the diffusion of power and resources across federal, state and local governments has allowed poor people’s movements to turn to federal authorities at times when local governments have been conservative and resistant and vice versa. Today, progressive federalism has allowed community-based organizations and poor people’s movements to expand the political class—making successful runs for elected office and pushing through local ordinances that become models for other city, state, and federal governments.

LPE Originals

Federalism is unlikely to save progressive politics

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American federalism is not neutral. In fact, federalism’s many venues generally disadvantage groups with comprehensive, progressive policy aims for several reasons: first, federalism does not just create political opportunities but also limits them; second, state and local governments  are poorly situated to solve national problems; third, jurisdictional boundaries can be remade in ways that disadvantage progressives; and finally, contestation itself over which level of government should perform which activities harms progressive causes.
LPE Originals

The New Trust Code

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Legal scholars who care about how law creates wealth and power cannot afford to disregard the trust. As Katharina Pistor mentions in her recent book, The Code of Capital, the trust stands out as one of Anglo-American law’s “most ingenious modules for coding capital.” Trusts are a longstanding component of the “feudal calculus” that Pistor…
LPE Originals

To Reimagine Intervention Strategies: The Political Economy of Domestic Violence

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In recent years, mainstream anti-domestic violence programs have moved away from a fixation on the criminal justice system to undertake economic justice initiatives designed to “respond to, address, and prevent financial abuse” related to domestic violence.  The shift reflects the growing realization that strategies of remedy through the penal state have tended to fracture the…
LPE Originals

Riding the Bus to a Green New Deal

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In a recent video, “A Message From the Future,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s voiceover imagines a time when climate collapse has been averted. Now a seasoned member of Congress, she rides the bullet train to the Capitol. It’s a whimsical opening to a compelling narration. But it raises two important questions: first, will the Green New…
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Transportation Justice: from Civil Rights to the Right to the City

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In the year 2000, the writer Joan Wypijewski visited Montgomery, Alabama, to observe the 45th anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott. Her findings were notable: “Montgomery’s transit system isn’t segregated anymore. It barely exists.” As Wypijewski told readers, the 1990s had not been kind to transit. After two decades of local Republican leadership, and following…
LPE Originals

The Uber/Lyft “Workers’ Association” Debate: A Response to Dubal

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I share Dubal’s worries about Uber and Lyft’s proposed “workers’ associations” and agree about the indispensable role played by independent, exclusive-representative unions. But I am more open to the possibility that we ought not necessarily reject workers’ associations of the sort being contemplated in the California debates.
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Gig Worker Organizing for Solidarity Unions

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The “gig economy” is one place where organizing outside of traditional trade unions is undoubtedly happening in surprising and perhaps unexpected ways. For example, on May 8, 2019, a group of independent app-based drivers in Los Angeles called the LA Rideshare Drivers United organized and launched an unprecedented international picket and work stoppage against Uber…
LPE Originals

Solidarity Unionism v. Company Unionism in the Gig Economy

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The CEOs of the two top-competing gig firms—Uber and Lyft—penned a June 12, 2019 OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle in which they claim that after over six years of local, state, federal, and international law-breaking, ignoring the concerns of drivers, and viciously fighting any efforts to achieve living wage and benefits, they are ready…
LPE Originals

Killing Antitrust Softly (Through Procedure)

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The Supreme Court has waged a multi-decade war on private rights of action. It has subverted the rights of consumers, workers, small businesses, and others to hold corporations accountable for wrongdoing through lawsuits. The Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) has been a preferred tool of the Court. Since the 1980s, it has reinvented this modest statute,…
LPE Originals

How Should We Think About Democracy?

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The concept of democracy is critical to the Law and Political Economy approach, yet its precise meaning is not always clear. On the left, “democracy” often functions as shorthand for the opposite of whatever has most recently earned our wrath: be it oligarchy or neoliberalism, marketization or regulatory capture, technocracy or inequality. Even when the…
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Human Waste Management

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This post explores “extraction” as a keyword for analyzing the social and ecological world. Like “reproduction,” “extraction” has a Marxist pedigree, but it also carries at least four connotations that “reproduction” doesn’t. The first is non-renewability; the second is corruption; the third is waste; and the fourth is violence.
LPE Originals

Restorative Justice and Moral Neoliberalism

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Restorative justice is thus intriguing not only for how left organizers use it to advance prison abolition but also for how libertarian and conservative reformers have fashioned it into a tool of American neoliberalism.