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LPE Originals

Making Care Work Green

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Click here to read all posts in our Care Work series.  “Domestic workers arrive to smoke, ash,” the headline in the Los Angeles Times read on October 29, 2019. Unaware of mandatory evacuations from a fire sweeping through exclusive enclaves near the Getty Museum, domestic workers had trudged up deserted streets and through particle-filled air…
LPE Originals

Measuring the Sustainable Corporation

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This post comes out of the early career workshop ‘Law and Political Economy in Europe’, which took place at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, at the University of Oxford, on the 7th of October 2019. For all the posts this series, click here. The impending climate crisis, the widespread social tensions and the burgeoning level of wealth and…
LPE Originals

Disrupting Doctrine at Penn Law

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This post continues our series featuring efforts to organize LPE student groups at several law schools. You can read the rest of the posts here. Why do people who believe in a more just, egalitarian society go to law school? Some of us hope to learn how the law can be used to disrupt the status…
LPE Originals

LPE Society at Berkeley Law

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This post continues our series featuring efforts to organize LPE student groups at several law schools. You can read the rest of the posts here. Berkeley holds a unique place in the public imagination as the home of the Free Speech Movement and the People’s Park protests, as Earl Warren’s alma mater, and as a reliable…
LPE Originals

LPE: A Rising Tide at Miami Law?

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This post continues our series featuring efforts to organize LPE student groups at several law schools. You can read the rest of the posts here. Our introduction to Law & Political Economy came during the February 2019 Rebellious Lawyering Conference (“RebLaw”) at Yale Law School. The Miami Law chapter of the National Lawyers Guild sent six…
LPE Originals

LPE Student Organizing at YLS

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Over the past year, student organizing has become an important part of the Law and Political Economy Project. This week we’re highlighting the work of several LPE student chapters. We hope that by amplifying their work, we can reach more students at more law schools.
LPE Originals

To Democratize Environmental Law, Let Ordinary People Decide

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Environmental law has never felt so undemocratic. On nearly every aspect of environmental protection, the federal government is disconnected from the desires of its citizens. The best most citizens can hope for is that a still-distant election will produce a friendlier administration, one that will manage to embrace our priorities despite the immense influence of industry. There’s an irony beneath that sense of powerlessness, one that reveals a tragic flaw in modern environmental law. I want to both explore that flaw and introduce a tool from environmental law’s past that might help fix it. It’s a tool that entrusts ordinary people to decide: the jury.
LPE Originals

The Democratic Political Economy of Administrative Law

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The modern administrative state has always faced ongoing debates about the appropriate balance between administrative authority and procedural constraint. But this moment of debate is about more than just the familiar clashes between “big government” and “free market” visions of political economy. These attacks on the administrative state—and the historical and current efforts to (re)build administrative institutions—are a critical frontline for our substantive moral values of democracy, equality, and inclusion.
LPE Originals

Policymaking as power-building

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Many of the critical day-to-day governance decisions — from zoning to civil rights enforcement to worker protections, financial regulations, and consumer rights — take place within the administrative state. Without a greater degree of democratic responsiveness and accountability within the administrative process, these substantive rights are unlikely to be vindicated or equitably enforced. This means that policymakers and administrative law scholars alike need to start approaching the task of administrative institutional design with a greater attention to power disparities.
LPE Originals

A New Sex Positivity Dichotomy

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Though feminists and queer theorists love the subversiveness of proclaiming “hoe is life,” they are also married to the idea that eventually they will be monogamous. While it is perfectly natural and okay for them to have sex with anyone they want and to extoll “safer kinky sex,” many still believe that paying for sex sullies the interaction, or removes from it any possibility of true “consent.
LPE Originals

Sex, Markets, and Political Economy

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Among the various perspectives utilized to understand sex work, a political economy approach directs attention to the fundamentally political and moralized nature of markets. Markets are not abstract spaces for economic transactions but rather politically contested terrains of societal struggle where competing actors wield technical legal tools and moralized beliefs in attempts to shape structures of societal governance.