Law and Political Economy Conference

It is commonplace in law and political economy scholarship to hear calls to “democratize” institutions or areas of law. This panel will interrogate what democratization might look like in practice across very different institutional contexts: utility regulation and workers cooperatives; administrative agencies; industrial policy; and the carceral state. By engaging across these distinct settings, the panelists aim to shed light on the conditions necessary for more genuinely egalitarian democratic control over the state and economy, and consider what it will take to get there.

Panelists: Amy Kapczynski (Yale Law School), Joel Michaels (Yale Law School), K. Sabeel Rahman (Brooklyn Law School), and Sandeep Vaheesan (Open Markets Institute)

Moderator: Luke Herrine (University of Alabama School of Law)

Technology today is a fundamental intermediary of labor and work, presenting enormous implications for workers’ rights and economic democracy. This panel will investigate how the legal regulation of data and technology shape capitalist relations, looking specifically at algorithmic decision-making, workplace surveillance, and artificial intelligence. Panelists will present new scholarship examining how these technologies are reshaping the relative power of workers and firms, and what these changes mean for collective action and industrial policy.

Panelists: Veena Dubal (UC Law SF), Frank Pasquale (Brooklyn Law School), and Brishen Rogers (Georgetown Law School)

Moderator: Aaron Benanav (Syracuse University)

This panel will examine how legal regimes, carceral institutions, and social programs alike have evolved as vehicles to manage poverty and produce more governable and “productive” subjects, particularly in poor communities and communities of color. Panelists will discuss how social constructions of race, disability, and gender dictate the forms by which our legal systems interact with those subjects and explore what these insights mean for popular mobilization.

Panelists: Jasmine Harris (Penn Law), Jamelia Morgan (Northwestern Law), and Jonathan Simon (Berkeley Law)

Moderator: Andrew Crespo (Harvard Law School)

What are the contours of self-determination at a global scale? In this panel, leading critical legal scholars will examine the dynamics of social control and empire in the overlapping contexts of militarism, debt relations, and climate crisis. Surveying their fields, the panelists will discuss the role of law in international political economy and suggest areas for urgent intervention in the transnational legal order.

Panelists: Zohra Ahmed (University of Georgia School of Law), Asli Bali (Yale Law School), Angela Harris (UC Davis School of Law), and Ntina Tzouvala (ANU College of Law)

Moderator: Felipe Ford Cole (Boston College Law School)

How are people organizing to dismantle carceral structures, logics, and practices that pervade their communities? This panel will feature organizers, practitioners, and journalists on the frontlines who will highlight how communities are strategically mobilizing against the carceral state, with a focus on public schools and the child welfare system.

Panelists: nia t. evans (independent journalist), Joyce McMillan (JMacforFamilies), and Leon Smith (Citizens for Juvenile Justice)

Moderator: Amna Akbar (Ohio State University Moritz College of Law)

This panel puts law and political economy perspectives on the labor movement in direct conversation with the on-the-ground efforts of organizers, practitioners, and journalists. Panelists will discuss their experiences in the labor movement, how their work interacts with the legal system, the challenges they confront, and the strategies on which they rely.

Panelists: Maximillian Alvarez (Real News Network and author of The Work of Living: Working People Talk About Their Lives and the Year the World Broke), Willie Burden (International Brotherhood of Teamsters), Kim Kelly (journalist and author of Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor), and Lenita Reason (Brazilian Worker Center)

Moderator: Diana Reddy (Berkeley Law)

This panel will examine how our conceptions of constitutionalism, the courts, and legal authority facilitate or hinder shifts to more democratic modes of self-government. Panelists will trace the historical roots of our contemporary “juristocracy” and suggest interventions that reimagine the relationships between legal institutions, constitutional theory, and popular sovereignty.

Panelists: Niko Bowie (Harvard Law School), Ryan Doerfler (Harvard Law School), and Samuel Moyn (Yale Law School)

Moderator: K-Sue Park (Georgetown Law School)

What characterizes the production and articulation of race, gender, and class in capitalism? What role do law and legal theory play? The papers in this panel address the legal infrastructure that sustains low-wage work under racial capitalism, social movement strategies challenging the immiseration of workers, and the role of lawyers in social movements; the need for LPE to engage the moral politics of productivity and the background legal structures that reward extraction of human value; and offer a new approach to class analysis designed to explain the dynamics of capitalism and the integral role of a racialized underclass and gender subordination in its history and structure.

Panelists: Sameer Ashar (UCI Law), Yochai Benkler (Harvard Law School), Martha McCluskey (University of Buffalo Law School), Talha Syed (Berkeley Law)

Moderator: Guy-Uriel Charles (Harvard Law School)

What are the stakes in revisiting, and maybe reinventing, the socialist tradition? In this conversation, Professors Willy Forbath (UT Austin School of Law) and Aziz Rana (Cornell Law School) will explore the history of socialist constitutionalism, its political-economic commitments, and how they might guide constitutional visions today. Professor Forbath will frame his remarks in terms of an international and comparative project, while Professor Rana will discuss his forthcoming book, The Constitutional Bind: Why a Broken Document Rules America (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

This panel will examine how legal regimes regulate gender in contemporary capitalism. These regimes are varied and extensive, including public health infrastructures, insurance markets, and surveillance technologies. In both ideological and material terms, panelists will discuss how these systems construct gender relations, relations of care, and patterns of social reproduction.

Panelists: Aziza Ahmed (Boston University School of Law), Deborah Dinner (Cornell Law School), and Salomé Viljoen (University of Michigan Law School)

Moderator: Amy Kapczynski (Yale Law School)