 | |
| 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. In addition to a blog, the Project regularly hosts speaking events, debates, and lectures. It also circulates printed materials, hosts a summer academy and runs mentoring programs.
In 2016, a group of Yale Law School students asked Amy Kapczynski, a faculty member at Yale, 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 was launched. [2]
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 has ten official student chapters and many more clusters spread across the country.
In 2020, LPE Europe was established as a research network for LPE thinkers in Europe. [3] In 2023, Gujarat National Law University became the first National Law University in India to have a chapter dedicated to the LPE Project. [4]
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). [5] In doing so, LPE challenges legal pedagogy and education, viewing all fields of law, including “private law” inseparable from concerns of social justice and democracy. Specifically, the LPE Project has called for an end to the separation of law students studying "social justice" and those studying "economics". [6] The LPE Project can be also understood as a response to neoliberal and conservative intellectual infrastructure, in opposition to the groups like the Olin Foundation and the Federalist Society. [7]
The LPE Project's methods are repeating and revising previous work in critical legal theory [8] and confronting long term policy phenomena that defy traditional legal analysis, including social problems rooted in political economy, by constructing new legal structures. The Project also challenges popular understandings of what constitutes the economy, because these definitions imply valuations of work, people and geographies that legal theory operates on and within. [9] The Project contests these boundaries by using critiques stemming from social justice scholarship and new boundaries are informed by feminist theory and pays particular attention to issues surrounding settler colonialism and racial capitalism. [10] By challenging the foundations of what constitutes the legal field of operation, the project hopes to reform legal scholarship and its concerns in general.
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. [11] The conference also hosted several “Emerging Scholars Workshops,” pairing young lawyers with mentors and faculty.
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price systems, private property, property rights recognition, voluntary exchange, and wage labor. In a market economy, decision-making and investments are determined by owners of wealth, property, or ability to maneuver capital or production ability in capital and financial markets—whereas prices and the distribution of goods and services are mainly determined by competition in goods and services markets.
In economics, a free market is an economic system in which the prices of goods and services are determined by supply and demand expressed by sellers and buyers. Such markets, as modeled, operate without the intervention of government or any other external authority. Proponents of the free market as a normative ideal contrast it with a regulated market, in which a government intervenes in supply and demand by means of various methods such as taxes or regulations. In an idealized free market economy, prices for goods and services are set solely by the bids and offers of the participants.
Anti-capitalism is a political ideology and movement encompassing a variety of attitudes and ideas that oppose capitalism. In this sense, anti-capitalists are those who wish to replace capitalism with another type of economic system, such as socialism or communism.
A market economy is an economic system in which the decisions regarding investment, production and distribution to the consumers are guided by the price signals created by the forces of supply and demand. The major characteristic of a market economy is the existence of factor markets that play a dominant role in the allocation of capital and the factors of production.
Neoliberalism, also neo-liberalism, is a term used to signify the late-20th century political reappearance of 19th-century ideas associated with free-market capitalism. The term has multiple, competing definitions, and is often used pejoratively. In scholarly use, the term is frequently undefined or used to characterize a vast variety of phenomena, but is primarily used to describe the transformation of society due to market-based reforms.
The Third Way, also known as Modernised Social Democracy, is a centrist political position that attempts to reconcile centre-right and centre-left politics by synthesising a combination of economically liberal and social democratic economic policies along with centre-left social policies.
Ordoliberalism is the German variant of economic liberalism that emphasizes the need for government to ensure that the free market produces results close to its theoretical potential but does not advocate for a welfare state.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger is a Brazilian philosopher, jurist and politician. His work is in the tradition of classical social theory and pragmatism, and is developed across many fields including legal theory, philosophy and religion, social and political theory, progressive alternatives, and economics. In natural philosophy he is known for The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time. In social theory he is known for Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory. In legal theory he was associated with the Critical Legal Studies movement, which helped disrupt the methodological consensus in American law schools. His political activity helped the transition to democracy in Brazil in the aftermath of the military regime, and culminated with his appointment as Brazil's Minister of Strategic Affairs in 2007 and again in 2015. His work is seen to offer a vision of humanity and a program to empower individuals and change institutions.
Nancy Fraser is an American philosopher, critical theorist, feminist, and the Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science and professor of philosophy at The New School in New York City. Widely known for her critique of identity politics and her philosophical work on the concept of justice, Fraser is also a staunch critic of contemporary liberal feminism and its abandonment of social justice issues. Fraser holds honorary doctoral degrees from four universities in three countries, and won the 2010 Alfred Schutz Prize in Social Philosophy from the American Philosophical Association. She was President of the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division for the 2017–2018 term.
The theory of state monopoly capitalism was initially a Marxist thesis popularised after World War II. Lenin had claimed in 1916 that World War I had transformed laissez-faire capitalism into monopoly capitalism, but he did not publish any extensive theory about the topic. The term refers to an environment where the state intervenes in the economy to protect larger monopolistic or oligopolistic businesses from threats. As conceived by Lenin in his pamphlet of the same name, the theory aims to describe the final historical stage of capitalism, of which he believed the Imperialism of that time to be the highest expression.
Post-capitalism is in part a hypothetical state in which the economic systems of the world can no longer be described as forms of capitalism. Various individuals and political ideologies have speculated on what would define such a world. According to classical Marxist and social evolutionary theories, post-capitalist societies may come about as a result of spontaneous evolution as capitalism becomes obsolete. Others propose models to intentionally replace capitalism, most notably socialism, communism, anarchism, nationalism and degrowth.
Richard David Wolff is an American Marxian economist known for his work on economic methodology and class analysis. He is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs of the New School. Wolff has also taught economics at Yale University, City University of New York, University of Utah, University of Paris I (Sorbonne), and The Brecht Forum in New York City.
Wendy L. Brown is an American political theorist. She is the UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Previously, she was Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science and a core faculty member in The Program for Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.
Social democracy is a political, social, and economic philosophy within socialism that supports political and economic democracy and supports a gradualist, reformist and democratic approach towards achieving socialism, usually under a social liberal framework. In practice, social democracy takes a form of socially managed welfare capitalism, achieved with partial public ownership, economic interventionism, and policies promoting social equality.
Alfredo Saad-Filho is a Brazilian Marxian economist.
Democratic socialism is a left-wing set of political philosophies that supports political democracy and some form of a socially owned economy, with a particular emphasis on economic democracy, workplace democracy, and workers' self-management within a market socialist, decentralised planned, or democratic centrally planned socialist economy. Democratic socialists argue that capitalism is inherently incompatible with the values of freedom, equality, and solidarity and that these ideals can only be achieved through the realisation of a socialist society. Although most democratic socialists seek a gradual transition to socialism, democratic socialism can support revolutionary or reformist politics to establish socialism. Democratic socialism was popularised by socialists who opposed the backsliding towards a one-party state in the Soviet Union and other nations during the 20th century.
Jodi Dean is an American political theorist and professor in the Political Science department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York state. She held the Donald R. Harter ’39 Professorship of the Humanities and Social Sciences from 2013 to 2018. Dean has also held the position of Erasmus Professor of the Humanities in the Faculty of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is the author and editor of thirteen books, including Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging.
Angela Wigger is a political economist at the Political Science department at the Radboud University in the Netherlands.
Wolfgang Streeck is a German economic sociologist and emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne.
Alexander Somek is an Austrian legal scholar.
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