The Workshop on Law and Political Economy is devoted to reading and discussing new scholarly work on law and political economy. Outside speakers and members of the Harvard faculty will present forthcoming papers or recent work, both theoretical or programmatic, on the role of law in structuring social relations, power, and justice in market society.
More information about the Spring 2025 workshop is available in the Harvard Law School course catalog.
Spring 2025 Schedule
February 3.
Diana Reddy, Berkeley Law.
Transaction Benefits at Work.
February 17.
Elettra Bietti, Northeastern University School of Law.
Data is Infrastructure.
February 24.
Felipe Ford Cole, Boston College Law School.
Race, Empire, and the Transformation of the Denial of Justice in International Investment Law.
March 3.
Hiba Hafiz, Boston College Law School.
The Dangerous Myth of Market Wages.
March 10.
Sandeep Vaheesan, Open Markets Institute.
Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in America, Ch 4.
March 24.
Zohra Ahmed, Boston University School of Law.
The Price of Consent.
April 7.
Jason Jackson, MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning.
‘Taxis versus Uber’: Planning vs. Markets, or Markets as Planning?
April 14.
Lenore Palladino, UMass Amherst School of Public Policy.
Good Company: Economic Policy after Shareholder Primacy, Chs. 2, 3.
April 21.
Matthew Dimick, University at Buffalo School of Law.
Capitalism and the Administrative State.
Spring 2024 Presentations
Ashraf Ahmed, Columbia Law School, Building Presidential Administration.
Maggie Blackhawk, NYU School of Law, The Constitution of American Colonialism [selected chapters].
William Boyd, UCLA Law, De-commodifying Electricity.
Madison Condon, Boston University School of Law, Corporate Scenarios.
Brian Highsmith, Harvard Law School, Regulating Location Incentives.
Chika O. Okafor, Harvard Law School, Seeing Through Colorblindness: Social Networks as a Mechanism for Discrimination.
Saule Omarova, Cornell Law School, Public Banking as an Institutional Design Project.
Ahmed White, Colorado Law, Sedition and the Hand of Fraternity: Radical Unions, the Forgotten Red Scare, and the Making of the Modern Labor Movement [selected chapters].
Spring 2023 Presentations
Amna Akbar, Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, Reform and Struggles over Life, Death, and Democracy.
Kate Andrias, Columbia Law School, Constitutional Clash: Labor, Capital, and Democracy.
Abbye Atkinson, Berkeley Law, Borrowing as Belonging.
Karen Levy, Cornell Law School, Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance, Ch. 7.
Lev Menand, Columbia Law School, Banks as Public Utilities and Banking Law as Monetary System Design.
Naz Modirzadeh, Harvard Law School, “Let Us All Agree to Die a Little”: TWAIL’s Unfulfilled Promise.
Bill Novak, University of Michigan Law School, New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State [selected chapters].
K. Sabeel Rahman, Brooklyn Law School, Structuralist Regulation.
Aziz Rana, Boston College Law School, The Constitutional Bind: Why a Broken Document Rules America [selected chapters].
Ntina Tzouvala, Australian National University College of Law, The “unwilling or unable” doctrine and the political economy of the war on terror.
Salomé Viljoen, University of Michigan Law School, Prices, Data and Politics in the Market Machine.
Spring 2022 Presentations
Mehrsa Baradaran, UC Irvine Law School, The Legal Coup.
Yochai Benkler, Harvard Law School, Structure and Legitimation in Capitalism, Part I: Making Market Society from the Black Death to the Industrial Revolution.
Guy-Uriel Charles, Harvard Law School, The Shame of the Territories.
Christine Desan, Harvard Law School, How to Spend a Trillion Dollars.
Amy Kapzcynski, Yale Law School, The Public History of Trade Secrets.
K-Sue Park, Georgetown Law School, The History Wars and Property Law: Conquest and Slavery as Foundational to the Field.
Sanjukta Paul, Wayne State University Law School, Labor and the Legal Idea of Competition.
Jedediah Purdy, Columbia Law School, Two Cheers for Politics, Introduction, Ch. 7, and Conclusion.
Brishen Rogers, Georgetown Law, Data and Democracy At Work, Chs. 1, 2, 4.
Ganesh Sitaraman, Vanderbilt University Law School, Networks, Platforms, and Utilities Law and Policy, Chs. 1, 11.
Talha Syed, Berkeley Law, Legal Realism and CLS from an LPE Perspective.
