Journal of Law and Political Economy

The article argues that labor litigation helps to sustain, rather than interrupt, the process of worker exploitation. Using legal claims raised by Uber drivers and Deliveroo riders in the UK as a backdrop, it focuses on undue exploitation—exploitation beyond the limits set by law—as a mechanism that facilitates capital accumulation while hedging against the liability this mode of exploitation imposes. While assuming this outcome is socially undesirable and ideally curtailed by law, the article shows that the legal framework of labor litigation produces two complementary effects that reinforce exploitation through the embeddedness of irresponsibility. First, it disassembles the reciprocity between exploitation and liability, enabling extraordinary profit flows for exploiters. Second, it normalizes residual profits that persist beyond court awards. These effects frame exploitation as a gamble that will generally pay off, all the while embedding its social effects at a level no longer retrievable by law.

High-profile pronatalist supporters of reproductive genetic technologies have thrust these technologies into the national spotlight in the US, reprising questions about the relation between reproductive biotechnologies and eugenics. This article develops the concept of neoliberal eugenics to reframe common understandings of this issue. Neoliberal eugenics refers to the way that neoliberalism facilitates eugenic logic and outcomes through a framework of “choice.” The article draws on scholarship in disability justice and reproductive justice to articulate the limitations of choice before analyzing specific new reproductive genetic technologies and their political economy. The concept of neoliberal eugenics also reveals the flaws in judges’ reasoning in decisions about reproductive technology and eugenics. In short, the article argues that we need a new theory of neoliberal eugenics to understand the burgeoning reproductive biotechnology industry. That theory must consider political economy, especially the rise of financialized capitalism.

Human activity is dramatically reducing global biodiversity. In response, legal decision-makers have deployed regulations aimed at minimizing the impact of the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history. However, environmental law has recurrently failed to arrest rates of biodiversity loss. As such, legal scholars have proposed myriad reforms to overhaul the legal protection of biodiversity, ranging from introducing a crime of “ecocide” to granting legal personality to nonhumans. Yet there is a gap in the literature concerning the tendency of these novel proposals to reproduce the limitations of traditional methods. This article addresses that gap by critically reviewing the literature on the ontological tensions between Western-descended legal systems and the science of ecology. It argues that these tensions produce ecological “translation errors” within law that run deeper than is often acknowledged. The article concludes that increased skepticism—but not apathy—toward the legal form may be advantageous in confronting the biodiversity crisis. 

This research examines the international climate change regime, critically assessing the extent to which it is underpinned by the growth-oriented, mainstream conceptualization of sustainable development. The study first outlines the shortcomings characterizing the concept of sustainable development, as well as differences which exist between its mainstream and more progressive conceptualizations. Subsequently, it adopts a post-sustainable-development perspective to identify elements within the international climate change regime that reflect and normalize the mainstream conceptualization of sustainable development. Although climate change treaties “shall be based on best available scientific knowledge,” the literature reveals that mainstream sustainable development ontology is built upon shaky assumptions, including the feasibility of decoupling global economic growth from ecological pressures. Nonetheless, the three climate change treaties have increasingly been influenced by the mainstream conceptualization of sustainable development, thereby legitimizing and crystallizing its underlying assumptions. This article advocates for a scientifically grounded reconceptualization of sustainable development, or a complete replacement of the concept with ecologically centered alternatives.

The state is often perceived as a unitary fiscal actor, operating through a core budget managed by the treasury. However, recent scholarship increasingly emphasizes the role of off-balance-sheet fiscal agencies (OBFAs)—entities distinct from the treasury but tasked with similar fiscal activities, often backed by implicit or explicit state guarantees. This creates a complex and historically contingent “fiscal ecosystem,” shaped by political, economic, and legal dynamics. Using Germany as a case study, this article develops a methodology to categorize and map its extensive ecosystem of OBFAs, which number in the tens of thousands. These entities are analyzed in relation to their legal status, revenue models, and debt-issuance practices, with particular attention to their alignment with Germany’s constitutional debt brake and EU fiscal rules. The German case illustrates how states extend their fiscal reach by operating a more complex web of balance sheets than is often thought.

This review essay engages with various conceptualizations of the “capitalist state” and “state capitalism” within four newly published books. It posits that the capitalist state is not a homogeneous category—that the “mature independence of the economic sphere from the political sphere” in liberal capitalism and their “immature independence” in state capitalism render the role of the state in each geography different while producing distinct geopolitical structures within the global economic order. The essay argues that the extraterritorial liberal capitalism of the Anglo-Saxon sphere has historically produced and simultaneously peripheralized state capitalism outside this sphere. State capitalism has, in turn, posed threats to free competition and profitability rates of liberal capitalism, requiring intervention by the hegemonic power arising from liberal capitalism to tackle market distortion. As such, debates around the “return of geopolitics” to international law should be nuanced within the structural tendencies of the two forms of capitalism.