Law and Political Economy Project

This article has multiple issues. Please help or discuss these issues on the . (Learn how and when to remove these template messages) The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines for companies and organizations. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. Find sources:  –  ·  ·  · scholar · JSTOR (August 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) This article contains content that is written like an advertisement. Please help by removing promotional content and inappropriate external links, and by adding encyclopedic content written from a neutral point of view. (August 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

LPE Project

Formation	2019
Legal status	501(c)(3) nonprofit
Founders	Amy Kapczynski, K. Sabeel Rahman, David Grewal Singh, Jedediah Britton-Purdy
Website	https://lpeproject.org/

The Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project is a collaborative project that examines the relationship between the law and capitalism.

Founding[]

In 2016, a group of Yale Law School students asked Amy Kapczynski, also a faculty co-director of the Yale Global Health Justice Partnership, to teach a seminar that would allow them to better understand the social, political, and legal structures that gave rise to the election of President Donald Trump.^[1] Later that year, the LPE Blog launched for the mutual education of law students and professors.^[2]

LPE Blog to LPE Project[]

In 2019, the LPE Project was officially established, expanding the blog into a nationwide network of legal scholars, practitioners, and law students, with Corinne Blalock as its first executive director. While the Project is operated and administered by staff at Yale, the LPE project now has ten official student chapters and many more clusters spread from coast to coast. In addition to the blog, the Project regularly hosts speaking events, debates, and LPE-oriented 1L lectures. It also circulates LPE-oriented “alternative” syllabi and primers. Since 2020, the Project has hosted the registration-only Anti-Monopoly and Regulated Industries (AMRI) Summer Academy. It regularly offers “office hours” and other mentorship programming, in addition to supporting student work.

In 2020, LPE Europe was established as a research network for LPE thinkers on that continent.^[3]

Background[]

The LPE Project follows other left legal traditions, including legal realism, critical legal studies (CLS), Critical Race Theory (CRT), Feminist Legal Theory, and other schools of critical legal thought, in challenging the role of law in creating and maintaining inequality and systems of oppression. According to Blalock, the network looks not only to challenge law and economics’ hegemony, but to reimagine the role of the courts in democratic society (beyond all forms of liberalism).^[4] In doing so, LPE challenges legal pedagogy and education. While many well-meaning left-leaning law students, practitioners, and academics are now largely guided toward public interest law, these positions should be used to change rules “upstream” from fields where law and economics currently dominates. In other words, all fields of law, including “private law” [link] are considered to be inseparable from concerns of social justice and democracy. Thus, the legal academy and the practice of law both demand reform. Concretely, LPE calls for an end to the separation of law students studying "social justice" and those studying "economics."^[5] In some ways, the LPE Project is an affirmative response to the dominance of neoliberal and conservative intellectual infrastructure. For instance, the Olin Foundation has been central to the Federalist Society’s success and instrumental in backing Law & Economics within legal curricula to ensure that laws protect efficient markets above all else.

The LPE Project itself can itself be considered part of a broader ecosystem of LPE, most notably the Association for the Promotion of Law and Political Economy (APPEAL),^[6] ClassCrits,^[7] and the Journal of Law and Political Economy (JLPE).^[8]

Methods  []

Although legal realists and more recently critical scholars of law recognized these core insights long ago, their insights must be revived, and given new meaning in the face of our current challenges. This necessarily means working towards a synthesis of existing bodies of critical legal thought, including, as LPE Blog Editorial Board member Angela Harris puts it, “the Outcrits”, such as Feminist Legal Theory, Critical Race Theory (CRT), and other bodies of thought, asking "Who is the demos in democracy?”^[9]

Harris also argues #LPE methods are especially primed to apply to "wicked problems"—long term policy phenomena that defy more traditional legal analysis. This necessarily includes material analysis of "social problems" that people don't want to acknowledge are rooted in political economy. Like social justice movements, LPE breaks down silos, with a commitment to intersectionality, an awareness of law's limitations, and a commitment to building new legal structures rather than merely seeking inclusion in existing legal structures.

As part of this broader effort, the LPE Project also challenges popular understandings of what constitutes the economy. Harris, Kapczynski, and LPE Blog Editorial Board member Noah Zatz have argued that defining “the economy,” and studying how legal institutions have done so, should be central issues that LPE scholarship aims to address.^[10] The very boundaries of what counts as part of the economy (and markets, and capitalism) carry with them implicit valuations of certain kinds of work, bodies, and geographies. These boundaries are set through hierarchies maintained by ideology, discipline, and violence.

In contesting these boundaries, LPE is informed by other schools of thought. For instance, it embraces feminist scholarship on social reproduction that has long criticized the exclusion of “voluntary” housework and caregiving located within families and households from conventional accounts of the economy.^[11] Similarly, for LPE scholars, conventional understandings of “the economy” tend to overlook the involvement of outright coercion and violence in the production of goods, especially in the context of settler colonialism. The Project looks to the new scholarship of racial capitalism to the carceral state as another site where the conventional understanding of race and poverty as more “social” than “economic” cloaks power.

“Democracy Beyond Neoliberalism” - The 2020-2021 LPE Conference[]

In 2020–2021, the LPE Project hosted the widely attended “Law & Political Economy: Democracy Beyond Neoliberalism'' Conference as part of a deliberate effort to critically transform legal thought.^[12] The plenary session of the conference, “Radical Legal Imaginaries,” explicitly focused on the relationships between LPE and social movements (particularly abolitionist movements).

Other virtual sessions included, “The International Law of Money,” “Racial Capitalism,” “Moral Economy after Consumer Sovereignty,” “Revival and Renewal of Marxist Approaches,” and “LPE, Inclusion, and Public Law.” Some participants in the original conference chose to transform their panels into thematic symposia for the LPE blog. Conference blog symposia included, “Producing Subjects: Rethinking Productivity, Subjectivity, and Value,” “Political Economy, Political Technology,” and “Legal History of LPE.”

Finally, the conference hosted several “Emerging Scholars Workshops,” pairing young LPE thinkers with mentors and faculty.

References[]