1LPE – LPE Project

What Do You Mean by Efficiency? An Opinionated Guide

James Brandt — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 11:00:00 +0000

They say that the first year of law school is like an immersive course in a new language. At first, you don’t even know what the cases are about—let alone how to determine whether they’re still “good law” and in which jurisdictions. Once you learn some basic terms and rules, you begin to make some sense of the materials and even to imitate the style of reasoning they demonstrate. At some point you...

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Law and Political Economy: A (Very) Brief Field Guide for 1Ls

James Brandt — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 11:01:00 +0000

Law and Political Economy (LPE) is a critical approach to law that is focused on the way that purportedly neutral legal rules shape economic power, disguise the political and ideological choices behind inequality, and insulate “the economy” from democratic control. For law students who care about these problems, it offers a set of analytic tools for thinking about the way that certain neoliberal...

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LPE Field Guide: A Brief Reading List

Sam Aber — Wed, 01 Sep 2021 13:00:00 +0000

As we promised in our post on Monday, below is a list of recommended readings—mostly, but not entirely, from the blog—that helped orient us to the critical and constructive moves of LPE. Our choices are highly partial and subjective, and there is a vast literature on the Blog and elsewhere that can help to orient the critically-minded law student. But this is a brief place to start. To start...

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Law and Political Economy: A (Very) Brief Field Guide for 1Ls

Sam Aber — Mon, 30 Aug 2021 11:00:00 +0000

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K-Sue Park on How She Teaches Property

Luke Herrine — Mon, 21 Dec 2020 07:00:00 +0000

This past semester, Emily Prifogle hosted a series of conversations on “Race and Property in Historical Perspective”. As part of that series, she talked with K-Sue Park about her article discussing how she teaches property. This conversation seems likely to be of interest to LPE-ers who teach or study property (and others!). Some excerpts from that interview are below. A video of the full...

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LPE Student Organizing at YLS

LPE Blog — Tue, 29 Oct 2019 11:00:27 +0000

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—the impetus behind the student network, the successes and challenges of different chapters, and the community that students are building around LPE—we can reach more students at...

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Teaching Trusts & Estate as Critical Wealth Genealogy

Kate Redburn — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 10:30:18 +0000

Step into a Trusts & Estates classroom and you’ll find the first thing most students learn is that the guiding principle in U.S. wealth transfer law is freedom of disposition. As the Restatement (Third) of Property tells us: “The organizing principle of the American law of donative transfers is freedom of disposition. Property owners have the nearly unrestricted right to dispose of their property...

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Teaching Penal Abolition

Kate Redburn — Mon, 15 Jul 2019 11:00:47 +0000

In April, the New York Times ran a profile on abolitionist visionary and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and the Harvard Law Review published an entire issue on prison abolition. This fall, the University of Texas Law School Human Rights Center is hosting a conference on abolition. The new journalistic outlet The Appeal runs abolitionist pieces as a matter of course, and outlets like Rolling Stone...

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Against the Economic Pie: How “Redistribution” Limits Political Economic Analysis

Kate Redburn — Wed, 27 Mar 2019 11:30:00 +0000

What gets lost when we describe social or environmental justice as redistribution? This retrenches a fundamental binary—maximization versus distribution—in which maximizing logically comes first. By initially producing a bigger “economic pie,” law will be able to provide more generous slices to those who currently receive too little. The term “re-distribution” makes explicit the hierarchical...

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Against the Economic Pie: How Economic “Maximizing” Skews Legal Analysis

Kate Redburn — Tue, 12 Mar 2019 11:01:10 +0000

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 first in order. A recent New York Times...

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