Recent lawandpoliticaleconomy items

Review of Gerald Epstein, Busting the Bankers’ Club: Finance for the Rest of Us (University of California Press, 2024)

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Review of Gerald Epstein, Busting the Bankers’ Club: Finance for the Rest of Us (University of California Press, 2024)

Human Rights Risks in Clean Energy Supply Chains: Racial Capitalism, Critical Minerals, and Corporate Responsibility

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This paper argues that decarbonization will fail to deliver climate justice unless the transition to clean energy confronts the racialized political economy that has historically structured extractive activity and shaped international economic law. Grounding its analysis in racial capitalism, the paper contends that the growing demand for critical minerals risks reproducing patterns of exploitation, expropriation, and expulsion. Using lithium extraction in Chile as a case study, it shows how colonial legacies, dictator-era neoliberal reforms, and present-day regulatory architectures governing foreign investment and natural resource extraction have prioritized investors over human rights and the environment. Recent decisions of the International Court of Justice and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on climate change provide a normative counterweight to international investment law and potentially a pathway for inclusive and transformative reforms. By foregrounding racial...

Racializing Nature and Naturalizing Race: Intertwined Harms in International Law

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The way people treat each other and the way they treat their environment are inextricably intertwined. Thus, it is unsurprising that five centuries of colonialism, genocide, slavery, apartheid, and racial discrimination have produced climate change, mass extinction, desertification, deforestation, and polluted air, water, and lands. The West has used international law to institutionalize unaccountability for its racism and environmental harms. This article argues that international law’s inability to stem accelerating ecological decline is attributable to and inseparable from the discipline’s racism, and vice versa. This article explores five legal techniques—comparison, objectification, exploitation, taming, and extermination—that produce racist and environmentally harmful outcomes while cloaked in the legitimacy of the law. The racializing of nature and the naturalizing of race through international law depend on the erasure of subaltern worldviews. But another international...

Review of Austin Frerick, Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry (Island Press, 2024)

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Review of Austin Frerick, Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry (Island Press, 2024)

Front Matter v5 iss4

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Front Matter v5 iss4

Climate Injustice, Racial Capitalism, and the Contradictions of Property

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article examines the legal constitution of racialized climate injustice, assessing the racialized dynamics of property in the context of climate change. It explores these examples: first, the failure of the international climate regime to contest unjust appropriation of the atmosphere by industrialized countries regarding historical emissions; second, the limitations of the “no-harm” rule, which is effectively the internationalization of the domestic principles of the tort of nuisance, in providing compensation for the racialized harm caused by climate change; and third, how international investment law is allowing fossil fuel companies to seek compensation if governmental actions in response to climate concern impact their investment or hoped-for returns.

Racialized Landscapes and Climate Adaptation Economies

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article examines how the enduring legacies of racial capitalism and discriminatory land policies shape climate vulnerability and adaptation in US cities, using Miami as a primary example. It highlights how flooding and heat waves disproportionately impact marginalized, historically disinvested neighborhoods, which are further threatened by displacement resulting from “climate gentrification.” Miami illustrates these dynamics, as affluent residents relocate from vulnerable coastal zones to higher-elevation, previously segregated neighborhoods, driving investment and property value increases that endanger longtime residents with displacement. The article explores how factors such as land use policy, zoning, and public investments embed racialized landscapes and drive displacement risk in these communities. The article calls for “just adaptation economies” that embed antidisplacement measures in resilience investments, support...

The Color of Carbon: Racial Capitalism, Climate Change, and Law

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Climate change is a direct consequence of capitalism’s drive to maximize profits through the unbridled extraction of wealth from humans and nature, aided and abetted at every turn by law. In its voracious demand for cheap labor, cheap raw materials, and cheap waste disposal, capitalism has created a treadmill of fossil fuel–dependent production and consumption that has triggered a planetary emergency. It has also produced extreme economic inequality—a racialized division of wealth grounded in colonialism that enables the ultrarich to capture the spoils of the capitalist global economy while billions of people continue to live in extreme poverty. The articles published in this special issue examine the climate emergency and other ecological crises through the framework of racial capitalism. The theory of racial capitalism offers valuable insights into capitalism’s inherently eco-destructive logic and its reliance on racial stratification for the extraction of profit.

Front Matter v5 iss3

Thu, 21 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Front Matter v5 iss3

Review of Ignacio Cofone, The Privacy Fallacy: Harm and Power in the Information Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Sat, 16 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Review of Ignacio Cofone, The Privacy Fallacy: Harm and Power in the Information Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Toward a Predistributive Democracy: Polanyi and Piketty on Capitalism, Moral Economy, and Democracy in Crisis

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As accelerating inequality careens into plutocracy, and America tilts toward autocracy, Karl Polanyi and Thomas Piketty have become key resources for understanding the link between the social exclusions of capitalism and democracy in crisis. This and its companion article (Somers 2022a) explore each of these thinkers and put them into dialogue to generate the outlines of a democratic political economy that I dub a predistributive democracy . Deconstructing capitalism’s moral economy of market justice , building on legal and economic institutionalism , and advocating a movement of countervailing power against escalating commodification and dedemocratization are central components of the project. The first article focused on Polanyi’s contribution to a predistributive democracy. This one engages Piketty’s work as it evolves from a bent toward economic naturalism to a robust institutionalism and an agenda for a participatory democratic socialism. Neither Polanyi nor Piketty...

When Monopolists Union-Bust: Antitrust Standards for Unilateral Labor Market Conduct

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article clarifies standards for evaluating whether a firm’s unilateral labor market conduct (wage suppression) violates antitrust law. It begins by analyzing suppression of collective bargaining (union busting) as conduct that can violate Section 2 of the Sherman Act. This article is the first to argue that wage suppression can violate Section 2 if the conduct (1) harms the competitive process within a labor market and increases monopsony, (2) tends to exclude law-abiding rivals from product or service markets, or (3) forecloses any adjacent market. Conduct that satisfies any of these three standards can be restrained with antitrust law. The antitrust standards presented are applicable to any kind of unilateral labor market conduct, including worker misclassification, wage theft, vertical restraints, restrictive covenants, employer-driven debt, or child labor.

Against Increased Central Bank Independence in Australia: Better Balancing the Unelected Authority to Decide Big Distributional Trade-Offs with Principles of Constitutional Democracy

Thu, 7 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Prompted by the failed attempt to increase Australia’s central bank independence through removal of the government’s override, this article examines the central bank’s unelected authority to determine monetary policy and assesses whether this is justifiable in a democracy. It shows how political—and thus the people’s—power over economic management has diminished, positioning central bank independence within an antipopulist and antidemocratic movement in constitutionalism that has quasi-constitutionalized neoliberal approaches. In setting interest rates, central banks make decisions that involve big distributional trade-offs: sacrificing employment to achieve price stability; redistributing wealth from labor to capital. This article argues that such trade-offs necessitate retention of ultimate democratic control. The article thus supports retaining and refining Australia’s qualified central bank independence, and suggests novel policy options—compulsory savings and a job guarantee—to...

From Invisible Hands to Perversity: “Unintended Consequences” as Neoliberal Rhetoric

Wed, 6 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Conservatives have long argued that progressive government policies tend to backfire (the “perversity thesis”). However, in American political discourse since the 1990s, this argument has been reframed in terms of “ unintended consequences.” The article explores this rhetorical shift by tracing the concept of “unintended consequences” from classical social theory to contemporary public policy debates. It finds that the term was originally associated with the notion of the “invisible hand” of the market, and gradually became aligned with the perversity thesis under the influence of neoconservatism, collective action theories, and Chicago School economics. The article argues that, due to this transformation, the “unintended consequences” rhetoric became especially valuable for neoliberalism, expressing both the efficacy of markets and the perceived failure of the democratic regulatory state. As such, the appeal to “unintended consequences” is revealed as an ideological stance rather...

Review of Jamee K. Moudud, Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism: The End of Laissez Faire?

Wed, 6 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Review of Jamee K. Moudud, Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism: The End of Laissez Faire?

Revisiting (Again) “Truth in Securities Revisited”: The SEC Disclosure Regime in the New Millennium

Mon, 5 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The system of disclosure for public companies no longer meets the needs of investors and other stakeholders. Largely put in place by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1982, the principles underlying the system have failed to keep pace with shifts in the market and dramatic changes in technology. The system requires a paradigm shift and fundamental alterations in the principles underlying the approach to disclosure. The shift must include the integration of comparative data, the expansion of the categories subject to mandatory disclosure, and the disaggregation of financial statements. Failure to update the system of disclosure will result in investors increasingly relying on sources of information outside of the periodic reporting process, reducing the importance of required disclosure and the role of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Front Matter v5 iss2

Mon, 5 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Front Matter v5 iss2

In Press

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In Press

Review of Bashir Mobasher, Constitutional Law and the Politics of Ethnic Accommodation: Institutional Design in Afghanistan

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Review of Bashir Mobasher, Constitutional Law and the Politics of Ethnic Accommodation: Institutional Design in Afghanistan

Review of Marija Bartl, Reimagining Prosperity: Toward a New Imaginary of Law and Political Economy in the EU

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Review of Marija Bartl, Reimagining Prosperity: Toward a New Imaginary of Law and Political Economy in the EU

Devaluing Sustainability: Financialized Disclosure Governance and Transparency in Modern Slavery and Climate Change

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The long-awaited European Supply Chain Act, known as the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), entered into force on July 25, 2024, has been criticized as a missed opportunity to advance more impactful protections for vulnerable stakeholders of global value chain capitalism. Concluding a lengthy, contested legislative process, the Directive’s adoption reflects the diverse trends that make up global value chain (GVC) governance today: disclosure legislation, international soft law, and private actors’ corporate sustainability codes of conduct. Despite an abundance of norms, egregious human and environmental rights violations in and around GVCs persist, and devastating factory accidents, worker deaths, and exploitation along with irreparable harm to lands and water continue. This article assesses the prevailing regulatory approach against the background of deeply rooted accounting and discounting methods that discourage actors from adopting substantial—and...

Introduction—Corporate and Securities Law Responses to Climate Change: Law and Political Economy Perspectives

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Global warming not only poses an existential problem for humans and the natural world, but also a fundamental challenge for businesses and the laws governing them. While only a few years ago, the climate crisis was considered separate from—even irrelevant to—corporate and securities law, it is now an urgent subject in both fields. In this special issue of the Journal of Law and Political Economy, we present new research at the intersection of corporate and securities law and climate change. If, going forward, business and securities law evolves to ignore global warming’s risks for businesses and markets, this result will reveal the fields’ politicized, ideological parameters, not global warming’s irrelevance to them.

Corporate Sustainable Finance

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Sustainable debt financing has exploded in recent years, growing from $29 billion in new debt issuances in 2013 to $1 trillion in new issuances in 2023. The continued success of the sustainable finance movement will depend on issuers’ motivations to engage in sustainable finance. This essay investigates the justifications for sustainable finance through a hand-collected dataset of disclosures made by green, social, and sustainability bond issuers. Review of these disclosures reveals that material legal, physical, and regulatory risks sometimes impact these issuers, but that these risks are not identified as motivations for engagement in sustainable finance. Instead, issuers appear to be motivated by shareholder pressures and a desire to enhance the green, socially engaged, or sustainable nature of their corporate brand.

The Externality of Discounted Externalities

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article addresses an unexplored problem in the externalities literature: the present value of future externalities. The problem arises because externalized costs and benefits occur in the future, and therefore should be discounted, yet discount rates used by corporate decision-makers are typically higher than the appropriate social discount rate.

In simple terms, corporations discount the future too much, and therefore underproduce potential future benefits and overproduce potential future costs. Our key insight is that the impact of high corporate discount rates, relative to the socially appropriate discount rate, is an additional externality. We refer to the additional costs that arise when corporations use higher-than-optimal discount rates as “the externality of discounted externalities.”

Policy makers should take into account the difference between corporate and social discount rates. Regulators and courts that seek to incentivize corporations...

Transnational ESG: The Impact of EU Sustainability Directives on US Law and Policy

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) represent transformative developments in global ESG regulation. These ambitious mandates, core to the EU’s European Green Deal, impose significant environmental and human rights obligations not only on EU companies but also on thousands of non-EU firms—including US companies—with operations or business ties within the bloc. This article explores the implications of these directives for US firms and policymakers, emphasizing their extraterritorial scope and normative ambition. Unlike US law, which is mired in debates over financial materiality and limited by anti-regulatory sentiment and anti-majoritarian structural constraints, the EU directives adopt sustainability as a stand-alone legal goal. These directives position the EU as a de facto global ESG standard-setter, displacing the influence of US corporate governance-based reforms. The Article...

Ignorance Is Strength: Climate Change, Corporate Governance, Politics, and the English Language

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article discusses the Orwellian nature of the current debate about the role of climate change in corporate governance, by juxtaposing the arguments of climate-denying commentators about corporate governance against the objective facts. Settled law allows corporations and institutional investors to take into account risk factors like climate change and may require them to consider those risks when they are directly material, as climate change is for many industries. If anything, the corporate response to climate change has been too tepid, and the pace of climate change and its corresponding harm is outrunning efforts to constrain it.

No simple answer exists to addressing the dangers this Orwellian manipulation creates. But identifying that behavior and holding political elites responsible for a basic acceptance of fact and for consistently applying their stated principles is a necessary start.

A Topography of Effective Climate Governance in Canada: The Contours of Fiduciary Obligation

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Directors’ fiduciary duties in Canada include an obligation to identify and oversee management of the company’s climate-related risks and opportunities. The precise contours of these obligations need further articulation. Internationally adopted financial disclosure accounting standards and green and transition finance taxonomies help to clarify the reasonable expectations of regulators, investors, creditors, and other stakeholders in respect of directors’ specific duties to achieve climate financial resilience and transition the company to net-zero carbon emissions.

ESG Backlash in the United States—Investor Concerns or “Red Scare”?

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The United States lags far behind its counterparts regarding regulation on ESG investing. Part of this delay stems from a perceived “ESG backlash,” which has contributed to the SEC’s reluctance to require industry to disclose ESG practices. The regulatory landscape has now shifted, with the SEC proposing two ESG-centric rules—the ESG Fund Disclosure Rule and the ESG Names Rule.

Both rules have garnered numerous comments from academics, industry, investors, NGOs, and political actors. But the interest—and backlash—extends beyond public comments. States, investors, and other entities have instituted litigation that challenges ESG and anti-ESG policies alike. Amid this conflict, it is still unclear whether ESG backlash is investor-led or a political tool. To determine the source of the backlash, we analyze the comments for and against both rules. We also examine previous and ongoing ESG litigation to uncover whether these trends foretell litigation against...

Front Matter v5 iss1

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Front Matter v5 iss1

Review of Ruth Dukes and Wolfgang Streeck, Democracy at Work: Contract, Status and Post-Industrial Justice (Polity Press, 2023)

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Review of Ruth Dukes and Wolfgang Streeck, Democracy at Work: Contract, Status and Post-Industrial Justice (Polity Press, 2023)

Review of Julia Calvert, The Politics of Investment Treaties in Latin America (Oxford University Press, 2022)

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Review of Julia Calvert, The Politics of Investment Treaties in Latin America (Oxford University Press, 2022)

The Biden Administration’s Initiative to Modernize Regulatory Review

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Biden administration’s initiative to modernize regulatory review, while attempting to incorporate various criticisms of cost-benefit analysis (CBA), was hobbled by an insufficient theoretical analysis. Specifically, the administration failed to address its implicit naturalization of the economic subject, under which subjects and their preferences are regarded as exogenous givens. The justification for CBA is that it can use information regarding individual “willingness to pay” (WTP) or “willingness to accept” (WTA) to discern these preferences, and thereby create efficient policy. But if the naturalized subject is fictional, then there is nothing to discern. Subjects and their preferences are not waiting to be found; rather, they are endogenously shaped. Recognition of this endogeneity would allow for preferences, or values, constituted through democratic spaces to be no less salient to policy than those ostensibly exogenous to the market. Further, it would allow for...

Introduction: Improvements, Complements, and Alternatives to Quantitative Analysis in Competition Law and Industrial Regulation

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The fundamental legal, normative, and politico-economic assumptions underpinning both competition law and administrative governance are in a period of considerable flux (Harris and Varellas 2020, 3; Britton-Purdy et al. 2020, 1801-02; Khan 2019; Rahman 2018). Past calls for a renewed economic analysis of law are striking a chord with present scholars. In this issue of the Journal of Law and Political Economy, we commence a specially edited series of articles focused on the value, shortcomings, and potential improvement of quantitative analysis in competition law and regulatory decision-making. This multi-year project aims to provide guidance and insight to advocates, judges, and regulators on the proper nature and scope of quantitative methods in several important areas of law and policy.

Review of Andrew Schrank, The Economic Sociology of Development (Polity Press, 2023)

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Review of Andrew Schrank, The Economic Sociology of Development (Polity Press, 2023)

Antitrust’s Right Turn in the Late 1970s

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In this essay, we detail the fundamental reasons for antitrust policy’s right turn toward the consumer welfare theory and against antitrust enforcement in the 1970s. Two recent articles raise questions as to the cause of this turn, with one article arguing that big business capture facilitated the right turn, while another touts a consensus around science-based economics. We argue that while the capture theory is more persuasive, power dynamics between heterogeneous business alliances shifted due to changes in the economy that eroded the incomes of the wealthiest; reductions in antitrust enforcement was one means of restoring that lost income. This essay details that economic history in support of a more nuanced capture theory.

Is the Problem with Antitrust Law or Antitrust Enforcement?

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There is an emerging belief that antitrust has failed marginalized populations. For example, exclusionary practices have helped to produce banking and food deserts in low-income communities, though antitrust has seldom intervened. But is this a problem of antitrust law? In fact, another claim is that antitrust law is just fine as opposed to how federal agencies enforce antitrust. Since agencies must decide which cases to bring, they should perhaps pay better attention to marginalized communities or draft complaints to emphasize their unique injuries. This topic is especially salient, given the ongoing debate about whether the consumer welfare standard is able to promote competition in modern markets. In essence, the root of why antitrust has yet to meet its potential of serving marginalized communities may lie with the law and its interpretation or, alternatively, people and organizations enforcing it.

The Intellectual Origins of the Modern International Tax Regime: Edwin R. A. Seligman, Economic Allegiance, and the League of Nations’ 1923 Report

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In March 1923, a group of prominent political economists and tax law experts gathered in Geneva, Switzerland to discuss the post–World War I framework for a new international tax regime. Commissioned by the League of Nations, these experts produced a comprehensive report that gradually became the intellectual foundation of the modern international tax regime. Relying on archival materials and other primary sources, this article contends that the US expert Edwin R. A. Seligman played a vital role in revising the report. While scholars have noted Seligman’s influence over US tax law and policy, his pivotal role in drafting the 1923 report has only recently been acknowledged. This article builds on this recent scholarship by investigating how Seligman’s background, experiences, and ideas—particularly his analysis and advocacy of the concept of “ability to pay” and “economic allegiance”—shaped the 1923 Report, and hence the subsequent development of the modern international tax regime.

Infrastructural (Dis)Entitlement: Tactics of Dispossession on the Critical Minerals Frontier

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In Ontario’s far north, settler state authorities and extractive firms are engaged in coordinated tactics to gain ground amid a polarization in the positions of Indigenous leadership. Alongside a surging resistance, we also witness a resigned acceptance of critical minerals mining by some First Nations. Drawing on years of community-engaged research, I detail here the contemporary tactics of “infrastructural (dis)entitlement:” in this dynamic, infrastructural needs are both denied and fulfilled to differential effect. Infrastructural disentitlement is passive; it is not necessarily deliberate, nor is it politically or institutionally organized. But infrastructural entitlement is strategic and aggressive: Indigenous prosperity and inclusion are key elements of the contemporary liberal justification for critical minerals extraction. From this, a pattern emerges of places toward which resources are flowing and places out of which they are draining. The chronic...

The Neoliberal Understanding of Human Rights and the Failure to Protect Refugees

Fri, 6 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The connection between neoliberalism and human rights, which both took flight in the 1970s and 1980s, has garnered significant scholarly attention. Interestingly, from the 1970s onward, there have also been important turning points in the history of refugee protection that have fostered a minimalist approach to refugee protection. Given neoliberalism’s significant influence on the contemporary understanding of human rights, the question arises whether this neoliberal understanding of human rights also extends to refugee rights and refugee protection. This article argues that the minimalist approach to refugee protection presupposes a specific understanding of the rights of refugees that combines with a neoliberal understanding of human rights in general. Refugees are no longer perceived to have rights, but to have needs. Like human rights in general, refugee rights were reshaped according to the idea that saving bare lives and provision of basic needs is deemed sufficient.

Review of Anu Bradford, Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology (Oxford University Press, 2023)

Fri, 6 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Review of Anu Bradford, Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology (Oxford University Press, 2023)

The Legal Violence of Police Calls for Service: Toward New Community Safety Infrastructure

Fri, 6 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In this article, we return to the scene of the police call in the United States to conceptualize the basic needs and structural forces animating calls for service and their relationship to a jurispathic form of legal violence. We do so by revisiting the perennial question of why people call the police, analyzing how conditions of organized abandonment drive the call. We follow how police reports reveal the bureaucratic and administrative legal violence of policing itself, extending police logics and power into all social problems/response, obstructing the political capacity to imagine—and demand—the most basic of nonpunitive life-supporting infrastructure. Against this dominance, many are searching for more direct and meaningful ways to respond to crisis, making the police call a contested site for municipal politics and community resources through jurisgenerative abolitionist-like practices grounded in the empirical conditions of ordinary people’s lives.

Review of Matthew C. Canfield, Translating Food Sovereignty: Cultivating Justice in an Age of Transnational Governance (Stanford University Press, 2022)

Fri, 6 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Review of Matthew C. Canfield, Translating Food Sovereignty: Cultivating Justice in an Age of Transnational Governance (Stanford University Press, 2022)

Front Matter v4 iss3

Fri, 6 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Front Matter v4 iss3

Review of Aurélie Dianara Andry, Social Europe, the Road Not Taken: The Left and European Integration in the Long 1970s (Oxford University Press, 2022)

Fri, 6 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Review of Aurélie Dianara Andry, Social Europe, the Road Not Taken: The Left and European Integration in the Long 1970s (Oxford University Press, 2022)

National Identity and Economic Development in Market-Dominant Small Jurisdictions

Fri, 6 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Small jurisdictions that are globally competitive in providing cross-border financial services—market-dominant small jurisdictions (MDSJs)—occupy fascinating and unique positions in global markets, reflecting the complexity of their linkages with major economies. This article explores how the distinctive features of MDSJs highlight important dimensions of the relationship between national identity and economic development. I review literatures that aim to explain how jurisdictions behave in the economic context, focusing on concepts of nationalism, national identity, and nation branding, and how such phenomena might impact one another. I then assess their application to the relationship between national identity and economic development in MDSJs, where realities of size and geography prompt substantial outward orientation and incentivize innovations in law and finance to service economic activity largely occurring elsewhere. The article culminates with a vivid case study—the...

Algorithmic Management: A Radical Approach

Fri, 6 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This article develops a radical legal critique of algorithmic management with a view to providing strategic guidance to radicals seeking to navigate the problems caused by algorithmic management in a way that contributes to their wider, radical, political objectives. Contributing to a “radical” tradition in legal scholarship, the article’s approach is distinctive for evaluating the merits and demerits of algorithmic management by reference to its impact on the conditions for radical political struggle, and for taking seriously the implications of the law’s structural relationship with the capitalist system when it comes to whether, and if so, how, law might be mobilized in ways that can meaningfully remedy these effects or improve these conditions more generally.

The Legal Form of Climate Change Litigation: An Inquiry into the Transformative Potential and Limits of Private Law

Thu, 9 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This article analyzes the impact of climate change litigation on the form of private law, contributing to our understanding of the transformative potential and limits of private law. I argue that climate change litigation breaks the homology between the commodity form and the legal form, to surprisingly antisystemic effect. Developing this argument, I make three distinct contributions. First, I demonstrate that the legal form of climate change litigation is incompatible with the rationale of capital accumulation. Second, I update the commodity form theory of law elaborated by Pašukanis to conceptualize the transformations of European private law systems that have been unfolding for some decades, which I tentatively label “private law for the age of monopoly capitalism” (PLAMC). Third, I contend that climate change litigation departs from the rationale of PLAMC and that in these cases the legal form does not replicate the commodity form. This rare dissociation creates antisystemic...

The Progressive Imaginaire: A Critique of The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution

Thu, 9 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This essay appraises Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath’s The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution (2022). The book proposes that an examination of American history since the founding of the republic discloses a polity that, at least incipiently and thereafter occasionally explicitly, promised its members lives of material well-being sufficient to their responsibilities as citizens of a republic. The authors argue that this promise, which they dub “democracy-of-opportunity,” was honed in battle down the years with champions of “oligarchy and exclusion” for mastery of the instrumentalities of “constitutional political economy.” They affirm the constitutive capacities of constitutionalism as a progressive fighting faith that can revive democracy-of-opportunity in the twenty-first century. This essay sympathizes with the authors’ broad objectives, but does not agree with their arguments. It argues that the lesson LPE scholars should take from this critical encounter is that the law of the...

Toward a Sociology of Contract

Thu, 9 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Economic sociology has neglected contract as an institutional foundation for market relations. It has also given inadequate attention to the role of forms of social difference such as race, gender, and sexuality in constituting market exchange. We argue that these omissions share common origins in the status/contract division that figured prominently in nineteenth-century sociological and legal thinking. In excavating these origins, we trace two alternative routes to “socializing the economy” associated with sociological and sociolegal traditions, respectively. The sociological approach rests on a dichotomous understanding of “status” and “contract,” with the result that social (“status”) relations are seen as regulating market exchange from the outside. By contrast, Legal Realists treat status and contract as copresent elements of social organization. Because status and contract are intertwined, they operate through the internal constitution of power and inequality...

Reconstructing Class Analysis

Thu, 9 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This article offers a reconceptualization of class-in-capitalism and its articulation with racialization and gender that builds on critical strands of Marxian thought and integrates insights from Black radical and feminist socialist traditions. Rather than a transhistorical materialist conception of class simpliciter, we develop a historically-specific conception of class embedded within an analysis of capitalist social relations. The result is an account of class based not on the appropriation of a “material surplus,” but on asymmetrical social relations in the division of labor and disposition of its fruits. Developing this conception along three key axes of asymmetries—property, production, and personhood—we show how the dynamics propelled by capitalist social relations are co-constitutive with those of racialization, while both the privatization of reproduction and gender-based super-exploitation are systemic features of these dynamics....

Review of David Schneiderman, Investment Law’s Alibis: Colonialism, Imperialism, Debt and Development (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

Thu, 9 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Review of David Schneiderman, Investment Law’s Alibis: Colonialism, Imperialism, Debt and Development (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

Review of Andrew Koppelman, Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed (St. Martin’s Press, 2022)

Thu, 9 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Review of Andrew Koppelman, Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed (St. Martin’s Press, 2022)

Front Matter v4 iss2

Thu, 9 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Front Matter v4 iss2

Capitalism and the Legal Foundations of Global Reparations

Thu, 7 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

It is widely contended that Africans were complicit in enslaving other African people, that slavery was legal at the time it was in force and, hence, that demanding reparations from states can have no legal basis. Drawing on the work of Nora Wittmann, this essay questions these presumptions, advances the argument that there is a legal basis for reparations, and puts the case for grounding the legal approach within a wider political economy of reparations.

The Future of Socialist Feminism

Thu, 7 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This essay describes three new versions of socialist feminism, briefly traces their genealogies, and shows how they address the economic and social crises we face today. Antiwork theory proposes basing individual and societal value on support for life rather than on production and suggests certain nonreformist reforms—a universal basic income and thirty-hour workweek—to advance the struggle to reach such a world. Care theorists share the central value of supporting life and its reproduction and propose ways toward these goals, including abolition of the family. The third approach puts forth new concepts of labor and class and deepens our understanding of the crises faced by global finance capitalism by injecting perspectives from struggles in the global South. All are concerned with how to produce changes in subjectivity adequate to support these struggles and to build a new society based on socialist principles.

Indecisive Liberal Faith, Capitalism, and the Constitution

Thu, 7 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Jack Balkin’s scholarship exhibits an indecisive faith, symptomatic of legal liberalism, committed to belief in the future moralization of politics and disavowal of that belief. This yields indecisive theories of constitutionalism, politics, jurisprudence, and history; repeatedly, focus on progress, open-endedness, and discussion neglects how previous decisions and entrenched institutions foreclose alternatives. Above all, Balkin disregards how capitalism precludes democratic redemption of liberal ideals. The Constitution entrenched capitalist social property relations and insulated them from the democratic process. Capitalism’s social compulsions foreclose democratic redemption of the liberal ideal of equally respecting the freedom of all. Constitutional legitimacy in capitalist democracy is entangled in contradictory imperatives to sustain both civic solidarity and accumulation. By undermining regimes of constitutional legitimation, accumulation has yielded cyclical patterns...

Front Matter v4 iss1

Thu, 7 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Front Matter v4 iss1

Review of Daniel Agbiboa, They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption, and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Thu, 7 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Review of Daniel Agbiboa, They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption, and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Review of Jane Spinak, The End of Family Court: How Abolishing the Court Brings Justice to Children and Families (NYU Press, 2023).

Thu, 7 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Review of Jane Spinak, The End of Family Court: How Abolishing the Court Brings Justice to Children and Families (NYU Press, 2023).

Dakar Declaration

Thu, 7 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Dakar Declaration

Introduction: Symposium on the 2022 Dakar Declaration

Thu, 7 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The second edition of the Conference on Economic and Monetary Sovereignty of Africa was held in Dakar, Senegal, on October 25–28, 2022. Participants from around the world debated the theme “Facing the Socio-Ecological Crisis: Delinking and the Question of Global Reparations.” The event was designed as a follow-up on discussions begun during the first edition (held in Tunis in 2019; see Ben Gadha et al. 2021), as well as an opportunity to reflect on recent developments.

The Dakar Declaration is one of the main byproducts of four days of intense, fruitful, and comradely debates on the triptych of delinking, socio-ecological resilience, and reparations. It is an internationalist manifesto and a global action plan.

Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and the Law (APPEAL): Transforming Law and Economic Power

Thu, 7 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This article reflects on the Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and Law (APPEAL), formed in 2012 as the first contemporary scholarly group named for the emerging field of Law and Political Economy (LPE). APPEAL organizes academics and allies to address urgent social problems by exploring possibilities for reorienting the economy toward justice, equality, and democracy. To mobilize ideas for change, APPEAL emphasizes collaborative intellectual communities. I situate APPEAL in the context of a neoliberal political movement to capture law’s power by investing in the Law and Economics message that economic power inevitably limits democracy and social justice. Though vastly outmatched in funding, APPEAL brings together experts in economics, law, and other disciplines to clarify and change influential neoliberal ideas about both law and economics. I highlight APPEAL participants’ scholarship showing the interconnected social, political, and legal nature of economic...

When Unification Creates Hierarchies or, The Deadly Life of Currency Unions

Thu, 7 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The picture of holding the same money in our hands across borders has time and again served as a symbol of unity, while its divisive potential often disappears behind a veil of hope. Real monetary solidarity—the necessary flip side of Pan-African trade and development—requires more than a simplistic plaster of neoliberal currency unions. The time is now to counter the US dollar dominance, and discussions of South-South monetary solidarity are many—from the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), the West African eco, the East African Monetary Union (EAMU), to a potential sur in Latin America and a move away from the petrodollar system. This contribution outlines a continuum of monetary unification systems and stresses the fundamental nature of political commitment to solidarity across monetary, productive, social, and political frontiers in order to achieve monetary unification as a stepping-stone to Pan-African unity.

Introduction to Symposium on Jean-Philippe Robe, Property, Politics and Power

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction to Symposium on Jean-Philippe Robe, Property, Politics and Power

“Vulnerable Workers” and Third Way Governance: Shifting Subjects of Regulation in Ontario’s Employment Standard Enforcement Regime