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LPE Originals

Gender Inequality and the Infrastructure of Social Reproduction

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Our jurisprudence of sex equality imagines a world without prescribed gender roles in the family and the public economic and political spheres. Almost fifty years ago, the Supreme Court repudiated the “separate spheres” tradition, which confined women to role of unpaid caregiver in the family and home, while reserving breadwinning and public power to men.…
LPE Originals

Against the Cult of Competition

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Competition is one of the talismanic words in law and economics and American life. It is often hailed as an unqualified good and touted as a solution to what ails society. The value of competition is endorsed across the ideological spectrum: Conservatives decry the lack of competition in schools and taxi cab services, while progressives…
LPE Originals

Economic Human Rights, Not Tough Policy Tradeoffs

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According to conventional law and economics wisdom, problems of economic inequality are best solved with targeted redistributive spending, not universal human economic rights. A political economy perspective suggests the opposite: that legal rights are crucial for economic justice. Orthodox law and economics tellsus: all rights have a cost. Law allocates economic gain, but cannot generate…
LPE Originals

The Real Barriers to Access to Justice: A Labor Market Perspective

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There is a vast literature on access to justice in the United States. In what Sameer Asher has diagnosed as a broadly neoliberal discourse, the legal profession itself stars as the key barrier to access to justice: It is slow to adopt technology, restricts entry with excessive licensure requirements, and bogs down in technicalities. Let’s…
LPE Originals

Free Trade Free for All: Market Romanticism Versus Reality

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The drama surrounding President Trump’s decision to impose import tariffs on steel and aluminum has roiled the Republican Party and wide swathes of the corporate elite. The tariff decision comes on the heels of political bluster about the US being treated “unfairly” by other countries. This accusation of “unfairness” when it comes to US trade…
LPE Originals

Antitrust and the Informal Sector in South Africa

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This is the second post in a two-part series about law and political economy in the South African context. The series reports on a collaboration among leading ‘heterodox’ economists, left-wing sociologists, high level government policymakers, and legal scholars, advocates and activists aimed at “thinking large” about reconstructing the nation’s political economy. *** The way out…
LPE Originals

Visions of Radical Reform in South Africa: Toward a New Constitutional Economy

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This is the first post in a two-part series about law and political economy in the South African context. The second post can be found here. The series reports on a collaboration among leading ‘heterodox’ economists, left-wing sociologists, high level government policymakers, and legal scholars, advocates and activists aimed at “thinking large” about reconstructing the…
LPE Originals

From Form to Reform in Law and Finance: Tammy Lothian

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As with most topics having to do with our primary modes of production and distribution – “microeconomics,” “macroeconomics,” “industrial economics,” “labor economics,” … – so with “financial economics” there is a well-entrenched orthodoxy that seems to enjoy pride of place in the academy and on the hustings. Indeed, one often hears “the financial markets” described…
LPE Originals

The Mythical Community Bank

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It’s not particularly surprising that ten years after the financial crisis, the Senate is poised to pass a deregulatory banking bill. In the world of banking regulation, memories are remarkably short. In fact, armies of lobbyists have been slowly chipping away at Dodd- Frank since its passage. But there is something sinister in the way…
LPE Originals

Guns and Privatized Sovereignty

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Like many of you, we’ve been moved by the voices of the student activists from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. With fierce focus and astonishing political savvy, they’ve unleashed an urgent new national debate about gun control. America today has the highest per capita gun ownership in the world, and evidence suggests that this is…
LPE Originals

Building on the Fight For $15: Lessons from the West Virginia Strikers

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In a week chockful of major news about the American labor movement, no story has captured the imagination of workers and labor activists across the country like the West Virginia teachers’ strike. Despite having no legally protected right to strike or collectively bargain, and despite facing Republican control of both houses of the legislature and…
LPE Originals

Structural Inequality and the Law: part II

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In the 2015 case Texas v. Inclusive Communities Project (2014), the Court upheld the application of a disparate impact standard for judging violations of the Fair Housing Act, enabling advocacy groups to challenge urban development policies that (re)produced patterns of racial and economic segregation. In justifying this interpretation of the statute, Justice Kennedy offered in…
LPE Originals

Structural Inequality and the Law: part I

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In the 2007 school desegregation case, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, the Supreme Court struck down the voluntary school desegregation efforts by Louisville, Kentucky, and Seattle, Washington for employing an overly aggressive mode of racial balancing. In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that de jure segregation—of…
LPE Originals

There is no necessary trade-off between good work and more work

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Mainstream economists tend to frame employment policy as a series of tragic trade-offs. If policymakers raise the minimum wage, they are told, employment will inevitably fall, perhaps precipitously. Requirements for vacations, too, might crash the job market. (Never mind that dozens of other prosperous countries mandate paid vacation time.) Technocrats of the center left complain…