As has been widely reported, the U.S. Department of Labor issued an “opinion letter” yesterday concluding that an unnamed “virtual marketplace company” does not employ the workers who make the company viable. Instead, the letter finds that these workers are independent contractors. The letter is flawed in multiple ways. As Sharon will explain, deciding a major…
Katharina Pistor’s new book, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality, deserves to be the essential text of any movement today that concerns itself with law and political economy. It establishes, as its central topic, how fundamental law is to political economy, in the tradition of classical social theory but with a considerable update in light of contemporary affairs. And, more fully than anything else I know, it vindicates the LPE intuition that legal intellectuals have something essential to bring to the current and ongoing debate about markets and injustice.
Solidarity economy institutions are local democratic institutions that function together to build a democratic political economy. Through solidarity economy institutions, local communities are creating the beginnings of a democratic political economy in which everyone controls together the systems that provide the things we need to live meaningful and joyous lives.
Even though humanity possesses the wealth necessary for every person to have everything they require in order to live with material freedom and dignity, current property regimes allow for 26 billionaires to own as much wealth as 3.8 billion people around the world. Many grassroots movements are trying to change this by imagining and building democratic political economy planning capacity through “solidarity economy institutions” premised on transforming the legal and institutional forms through which humans can coordinate to produce, exchange, and distribute, everything that we need in order to live.
Why do the laws underlying capitalism so heavily favor the wealthy and corporations? One answer, according to my research, lies in the political economy of the legal profession. At the most elite level of the profession sits the Supreme Court bar, lawyers with enormous influence over key rules that structure market relations. In a recent…
Economic policy must take seriously the social and ecological functions that have been treated as external to the economy altogether
The climate crisis demands substantial intervention in the economy beyond mere “market corrections.”
Instead of asking whether to maximize or divide scarce resources, legal analysis should ask how law defines the “pie” of societal well-being.
Since the 1970s, Congress and federal agencies have replaced regulator-established rates with market-derived pricing in many sectors of the U.S. economy. Electricity and natural gas are two such industries. Congress and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) have abolished regulated rates and instituted market-based pricing in a part of the electricity and gas supply chains.…
It is common to claim that finance is about ‘credit-intermediation,’ a matter of channeling funds from virtuous savers to needful end-users. The picture behind this assertion is that of a gargantuan broker—the financial system as ‘go-between.’ But modern financial systems are much more about credit-generation than intermediation. We need a new metaphor. In our view,…
Should law maximize or divide the “economic pie”? Law students learn that smart thinking begins by asking this question. But this question skews legal analysis against a political economy perspective. It implicitly presumes a hierarchy where an abstract idea of economic gain normally stands above and beyond political and moral concerns, bigger in size and…
When Tyson Timbs’ father died, he left his son an insurance policy. Timbs used $42,000 of that money to buy a Land Rover SUV, and he was driving that car when he was arrested for selling heroin to an undercover police officer in Indiana. Timbs pleaded guilty in Indiana state court to dealing in a…
That’s the title of a new article of mine, slated for publication in the Michigan Law Review. It’s more polemical than most of my work, and it aims to disrupt some of the tidy stories that organize modern administrative law. Although I hope it finds an audience across the political spectrum, its primary target is…
Contract is, of course, part of the core legal infrastructure that makes markets possible. But it is more than that. As an ideal type, it is at the core of all individualist social, moral, and political theories that seek to account for human sociality while avoiding social structure. Contract represents the ideal of being able…
Contracts is more than an area of law; it is a key piece of the vision we lawyers bring to many other areas of law. The 1L Contracts course supplies a foundation-stone of the “pre-analytic vision” with which lawyers will eventually think about many other things, including labor relationships. Labor regulation as such is addressed…
