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LPE Originals

Thinking Intersectionally About Race and Class in the Trump Era

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More than a year after the 2016 election, progressive analysis and strategy continue to be limited by the ping and pong of class-not-race and race-not-class accounts, and recriminations they provoke. Understanding what happened and charting a way forward require an alternative, a thoroughly intersectional analysis of race and class. On such a view, taking race…
LPE Originals

Modern Money and Historical Trauma

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In September of 2017, I attended the First International Conference of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Subtitled “Economics for a New Progressive Era,” the conference displaced the university’s annual Post-Keynesian Conference, signaling a growing enthusiasm for MMT among academics, advocates, students, and regular people. Reporters from Bloomberg and the…
LPE Originals

Subsidize Worker Organizing

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Advocates and scholars agree that the labor movement is in dire straits: shrinking union density, fewer successful elections, Trump appointees to the NLRB, and proliferating state free-rider laws all threaten labor’s power. Everyone knows that there’s a problem. The disagreement, however, is in the nature of the problem—and consequently, how to solve it. I submit…
LPE Originals

Why “Intellectual Property” Law?

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When I entered law school in 1999, I was primarily interested in two things: HIV/AIDS, and critical approaches to human rights. I was also young and queer, and Bowers v. Hardwick was the law of the land. Sodomy was illegal in many states, and so, it seemed, was I. So, I was also deeply interested…
LPE Originals

Law & Neoliberalism

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Neoliberalism is an indispensable term for making sense of the legal, political, and ideological conflicts of the moment, and also one of the most maligned. Liberals who feel criticized by it have insisted so often and so loudly on its uselessness that even those on the left who use it often seem compelled to apologize…
LPE Originals

Why Law and Political Economy?

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Why focus on what we call law and political economy, and why now? In the last decade, inequality has become impossible to ignore. The 2008 financial crisis and the foreclosures and dislocation that followed it shook public and (to a limited extent) elite confidence that financial markets would “police” themselves and work for everyone. The…