Data Governance for a Society of Equals
Rather than seeing data as person-like or property-like entity, egalitarians should focus on data relations: the way data’s collection and use puts people (or entities) into relation with one another.
Weekly Roundup: January 15, 2021
Aaaaaand we’re back! As the crises deepen, we’re doing our best to maintain our rigorous focus on the deep causes and what we can do about them. First things first: we have some new editors! Derrick Rice is a 3L at Yale Law School and a co-founder of the LPE student group. At the Blog,…
Weekly Roundup: December 4, 2020
At the Blog We finished up our series on the law and political economy of animal agriculture with Lee Miller’s essay on the connections between climate justice and justice for animals. Since we didn’t have a roundup last week you may have missed Caroline Parker’s introduction to the series, Viveca Morris’s case for breaking up…
Weekly Roundup: November 20, 2020
At the Blog Madison Gray (3L at Penn Law and part of the LPE student network!) published two posts on organized houseless folks winning a big victory in Philadelphia by refusing to budge from encampments they set up to support each other. Her first post recounts the struggle, drawing from the words of organizers themselves.…
Weekly Roundup: November 13, 2020
We’re back from election week!
On Socialism and Critical Legal Theory
A recent workshop on the “Jurisprudence of Distribution” invited the opening panelists each to provide a five-minute overview of what a contemporary approach within left legal theory might offer. Other speakers covered Critical Race Theory, Feminism, Vulnerability Theory, left political economy, and so on. I took socialism and critical legal theory. Here are my five minutes (with some slight modifications for bloggability).
The Academy and the (Undoing of) the Carceral State
This letter seeks to acknowledge how legal academia facilitates mass incarceration. Law professors must do more than teach the blackletter law, and we ask scholars for a commitment to situate their teaching of criminal law within the larger history and current context.
Policing as Unequal Protection
Black Americans have endured police violence since the nation’s founding. The origins of American policing have been traced to slave patrols. Today, Blacks are more likely than whites to encounter police, to be stopped by police, and to be fatally wounded by police. In recognition of this history and ongoing experience of violence, the Movement for Black Lives (“M4BL”) has called for the defunding of the police; community control of policing; and the development of nonpunitive, noncarceral institutions for resolving social conflict, among other transformative changes.
Rent Cancellation: Social Protection in Uncertain Times
With the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, interlocking structural inequities in health, employment, and racial justice have buffeted vulnerable populations. The looming “eviction apocalypse” sits at the nexus of these three ills. Black and Latinx people have the highest COVID infection, death, and unemployment rates nationwide. Mass evictions would only worsen this situation, preventing these households from sheltering in…
Law Student Perspectives: On Grief, Organizing, and Joy in Support of Black Lives
I think a lot of people at our law school talk about how the work is exhausting and spiritually draining, but not enough people talk about how the work is life-giving, deeply cathartic, spiritual. I don’t think that hit for me as profoundly as in this moment.
Where Is the Care in the CARES Act?
Two pandemic policy stories have been coming to a head: (1) the push for another relief bill as a key CARES Act unemployment insurance benefit expires on July 31, and (2) the ongoing national child-care crisis as school closures for the fall are announced amidst the virus’ resurgence. What connects them is kids’ needs for care and families’ needs for economic support when they—predominantly mothers, of course—perform that caring labor. A little-noticed feature of the CARES Act supports care for children who must stay home due to school closures.
Situating the Role of Democracy in LPE
One of LPE’s foundational commitments, as Sanjukta Paul reminds us, is that law constitutes markets – and that, as a result, we are free to constitute them differently. But this simply begs the question: how ought we constitute them? This is where political theory can be useful. As Sam Bagg points out, many LPE scholars already understand that democracy must have something…
The “New Normal” Privatization of the Workplace
As the COVID-19 crisis rages on, individuals around the world are now thrown into a work-from-home, digitally-enabled “new normal” of the workplace. For most white-collar workers, homes have become offices, and boundaries between work and domestic life are being reshuffled. This shift, however, is just an acceleration of prior developments well under way since the beginning…
You Planted a Seed: Legal Problems as Power Building Possibilities
This is part of our symposium on the legal representation of poor people. In January 2020, I sat in a courtroom in Atlanta observing as people with various housing problems went before a judge. The case that stood out most that day involved a Black man in his late 30s whom I’ve since given the pseudonym…
From Altruism to Solidarity: A New (or Perhaps Old) Model for Public Service
This is part of our symposium on the legal representation of poor people. “To put the matter crudely: if one relegates a certain social space simply to the selfish acquisition of material things, it is almost inevitable that soon someone else will come to set aside another domain in which to preach that, from the perspective…