Racial Capitalism – LPE Project

Some of the Best New LPE and LPE-Adjacent Scholarship

James Brandt — Thu, 22 May 2025 11:00:00 +0000

With summer just around the corner, are you looking to indulge in some juicy, page-turning scholarship? As always, the Blog has you covered. So throw those Capri-Suns in a cooler, grab your favorite e-reader, and load up some of our favorite forthcoming LPE and LPE-adjacent articles for your next trip to the beach, park, or (let’s be real) library. ** ** ** Sahil Agrawal, Melissa Barber...

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Racial Capitalism and the Assault on Federal Workers

James Brandt — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 11:00:00 +0000

How should we understand the Trump administration’s attacks on DEI programs and the federal workers assumed to have benefited from these programs? Commentators such as Adam Serwer and Karen Attiah, focusing on the dismissals of senior Black government employees and the purging of a federal workforce largely composed of Black and other racially diverse staffers, have identified the crackdown as...

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Six Biden Administration Officials on Reimagining a Progressive Future

Liz Brown — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Last week on the blog, Luke Herrine suggested that on the other side of the Trump-Musk hellscape – whose reforms might be so broadly unpopular as to “serve as a catalyst to productive mobilization” – there could be an opportunity for a more fundamental, ambitious rebuild of our policies and institutions. “A time of unpredictable politics is a time for non-reformist reforms,” he argued...

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Between Slavery and Incarceration: an Interview with Christopher Muller

James Brandt — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Mass incarceration is one of the great injustices of our time. For decades, small numbers of committed activists have protested this practice. More recently, however, the issue has gained wider public traction, with even some mainstream politicians and conservative organizations suggesting that it is something we should not tolerate. Despite this, it remains a subject whose history is often poorly...

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The Bad News About the “Good” Target: Consumer Redlining in Black Neighborhoods

James Brandt — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 11:00:00 +0000

My family and I regularly shop at two different Target stores. There’s the one in the Black neighborhood, where we go to get Black haircare products, and then there’s the one in the white neighborhood, where we go to get everything else. Silly, right? With gas prices being what they are and the high opportunity cost of my time, why go to two different Target stores? Why not just get everything...

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How Should Democrats Respond to the “Migrant Crisis”?

James Brandt — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 11:00:00 +0000

For the third consecutive presidential election, immigration became a defining issue of the campaign, with Donald Trump running on his characteristic threats of mass deportations. For her part, Harris, despite signing onto a relatively progressive immigration platform as Joe Biden’s running mate four years earlier, also tacked to the right, promising to pass sweeping border restrictions into law.

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(Some of) the Best Recent Global LPE and LPE-Adjacent Scholarship

James Brandt — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 11:00:00 +0000

As loyal readers may recall, we’ve made an effort in recent years to highlight some of the best forthcoming LPE and LPE-adjacent scholarship. However, since those compilations are tied to the US Law Review cycle and focus on accepted-but-not-yet-published pieces, they tend to exclude most global LPE scholarship. To rectify this oversight, we decided to pull together some of our favorite pieces of...

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Octavia Butler and Afrofuturist Legal Critique

Elliot Setzer — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 11:00:00 +0000

This past summer, many of us traveled back to the future. Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower, begins in July 2024. Through the eyes of Lauren Olamina, the novel’s young Black protagonist, Butler unveils the story of a not-too-distant future in which America is divided between a wealthy elite and the impoverished masses. While the rich shelter in gated communities with private armies...

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The Chamber of Commerce’s Moral Panic

Sohum Pal — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 11:00:00 +0000

The 2020 Black Lives Matter summer uprisings spawned remarkable movements and counter-movements. Discussions of police defunding and abolition proliferated into the mainstream, and prosecutors sought the label of “progressive.” The backlash, however, soon arrived in force: Police budgets largely steadied themselves, reformist prosecutors faced growing hostility, and the politics around “crime” and...

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Who Says Evictions Should Be Efficient?

Liz Brown — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 11:00:00 +0000

This post is part of a symposium on the law and political economy of civil procedure. Read the rest of the posts here. ** ** ** People engaged with the criminal legal system have long recognized the need for procedures to buffer the power of prosecutors, police, and judges. Civil procedure, too, must include speed bumps to restrain the force of the state, but civil procedure reformers tend to...

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