The Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project brings together a network of scholars, practitioners, and students working to develop innovative intellectual, pedagogical, and political interventions to advance the study of political economy and law. Our work is rooted in the insight that politics and the economy cannot be separated and that both are constructed in essential respects by law. We believe that developments over the last several decades in legal scholarship and policy helped to facilitate rising inequality and precarity, political alienation, the entrenchment of racial hierarchies and intersectional exploitation, and ecological and social catastrophe. We aim to help reverse these trends by supporting scholarly work that maps where we have gone wrong, and that develops ideas and proposals to democratize our political economy and build a more just, equal, and sustainable future.
LPE project
Learn
A variety of resources designed to help faculty and students learn more about LPE, including syllabi from LPE and LPE-related courses, primers on topics such as neoliberalism and legal realism, as well as videos from a number of events we have held over the last year.
Go to LearnEngage
Information about the amazing work being done by LPE student groups, as well as guidance on starting a student group on your own campus! A bureau of affiliated professors and practitioners designed to help faculty and students to bring LPE scholars to their campuses!
Go to EngageEvents
A compendium of upcoming (and past) events put on by the LPE Project, LPE student groups, and other organizations in the LPE ecosystem.
Go to Events
Weekly Roundup: July 10
Fifteen of our favorite films on law and political economy, Jeff Gordon proposes an anti-entrenchment industrial policy, M. Sandhu makes the case against legislative primacy, Aslı Bâli revisits The Constitutional Bind during the interregnum, and R.H. Lossin looks back at early-20th-century criminal syndicalism laws. Plus, a CFP for the Conference of Australian Progressive Legal Studies, a two-year post-doc on rethinking the anti-corruption toolkit, Diana Reddy on employment as a social institution, Luke Herrine on progressive financial empowerment programs, Lev Menand on the Court's Federal Reserve carveout, and Beau Baumann with even more LPE cinema.
Property, Sabotage, and the Origins of Anti-Left Repression
Between 1917 and 1921, twenty-one states passed criminal syndicalism laws. These laws, which were intended to help eliminate the Industrial Workers of the World, have largely faded from public memory. Looking back, however, we can see a formula for anti-left repression that has proven durable and widely appealing: the limitation of political speech and organizing in the name of property protection.
Revisiting The Constitutional Bind during the Interregnum
As the country marks 250 years, the left faces two imperatives at once: confronting a constitutional order warped by judicial supremacy, and reorienting American foreign policy away from endless war. A central insight of Aziz Rana's The Constitutional Bind is that these two crises were forged from the same fire, and may need to be resolved together.
Against Legislative Primacy
On this blog and elsewhere, Congress has recently been cast as a cure for our decrepit democracy. This push for legislative primacy is a mistake: it valorizes a deeply undemocratic institution, relies on a selective reading of the past, and distracts us from vital debates about the policies we should be pursuing and persuading others to support.