Journal of Law and Political Economy
Journal Data
| Type | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Publisher | eScholarship Publishing (US) |
| ISSN | 2693-9681 |
| Scopus | 21101287735 |
| OpenAlex | S4210176826 |
| MAG | 4210176826 |
| Website | https://www.scopus.com/source/sourceInfo.url?sourceId=21101287735 |
| Total publications | 112 |
| Coverage period | 2020 - 2026 |
| Country | US |
| Language | EN |
| Access | Open Access |
| Indexing | DOAJ indexed • Scopus indexed |
| Cited by | 39 |
| Impact factor | 0.697 |
| SJR | 0.423 (Q2) |
| SNIP | 1.043 |
| CiteScore | 2.7 |
| h-index | 1 |
| i10-index | 1 |
| Female authorship share | 41.4% |
This journal focuses on law and political economy, which are highly relevant to social anthropology, particularly through legal anthropology and critical political economy. It is a closely cognate venue that frequently publishes work read by social anthropologists
Law · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Climate Change and Geoengineering · Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration · Corporate Law and Human Rights · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Digital Economy and Work Transformation · Disaster Management and Resilience · Diverse Scientific and Economic Studies · Economic Theory and Institutions
Capitalist State, State Capitalism, and the Current Conjuncture of International Law
This review essay engages with various conceptualizations of the “capitalist state” and “state capitalism” within four newly published books. It posits that the capitalist state is not a homogeneous category—that the “mature independence of the economic sphere from the political sphere” in liberal capitalism and their “immature independence” in state capitalism render the role of the state in each geography different while producing distinct geop…
State Finance Beyond the Core Budget
The state is often perceived as a unitary fiscal actor, operating through a core budget managed by the treasury. However, recent scholarship increasingly emphasizes the role of off-balance-sheet fiscal agencies (OBFAs)—entities distinct from the treasury but tasked with similar fiscal activities, often backed by implicit or explicit state guarantees. This creates a complex and historically contingent “fiscal ecosystem,” shaped by political, econo…
The Legal Tragedy of Exploitation
The article argues that labor litigation helps to sustain, rather than interrupt, the process of worker exploitation. Using legal claims raised by Uber drivers and Deliveroo riders in the UK as a backdrop, it focuses on undue exploitation—exploitation beyond the limits set by law—as a mechanism that facilitates capital accumulation while hedging against the liability this mode of exploitation imposes. While assuming this outcome is socially undes…
The International Climate Change Regime and the Growth-Oriented Ontology of Sustainable Development
This research examines the international climate change regime, critically assessing the extent to which it is underpinned by the growth-oriented, mainstream conceptualization of sustainable development. The study first outlines the shortcomings characterizing the concept of sustainable development, as well as differences which exist between its mainstream and more progressive conceptualizations. Subsequently, it adopts a post-sustainable-develop…
Integrating Law and Ecology
Human activity is dramatically reducing global biodiversity. In response, legal decision-makers have deployed regulations aimed at minimizing the impact of the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history. However, environmental law has recurrently failed to arrest rates of biodiversity loss. As such, legal scholars have proposed myriad reforms to overhaul the legal protection of biodiversity, ranging from introducing a crime of “ecocide” to gr…
Neoliberal Eugenics and the Political Economy of Reproductive Biotechnology
High-profile pronatalist supporters of reproductive genetic technologies have thrust these technologies into the national spotlight in the US, reprising questions about the relation between reproductive biotechnologies and eugenics. This article develops the concept of neoliberal eugenics to reframe common understandings of this issue. Neoliberal eugenics refers to the way that neoliberalism facilitates eugenic logic and outcomes through a framew…
Climate Injustice, Racial Capitalism, and the Contradictions of Property
This article examines the legal constitution of racialized climate injustice, assessing the racialized dynamics of property in the context of climate change. It explores these examples: first, the failure of the international climate regime to contest unjust appropriation of the atmosphere by industrialized countries regarding historical emissions; second, the limitations of the “no-harm” rule, which is effectively the internationalization of the…
Racialized Landscapes and Climate Adaptation Economies
This article examines how the enduring legacies of racial capitalism and discriminatory land policies shape climate vulnerability and adaptation in US cities, using Miami as a primary example. It highlights how flooding and heat waves disproportionately impact marginalized, historically disinvested neighborhoods, which are further threatened by displacement resulting from “climate gentrification.” Miami illustrates these dynamics, as affluent res…
Racializing Nature and Naturalizing Race
The way people treat each other and the way they treat their environment are inextricably intertwined. Thus, it is unsurprising that five centuries of colonialism, genocide, slavery, apartheid, and racial discrimination have produced climate change, mass extinction, desertification, deforestation, and polluted air, water, and lands. The West has used international law to institutionalize unaccountability for its racism and environmental harms. Th…
Human Rights Risks in Clean Energy Supply Chains
This paper argues that decarbonization will fail to deliver climate justice unless the transition to clean energy confronts the racialized political economy that has historically structured extractive activity and shaped international economic law. Grounding its analysis in racial capitalism, the paper contends that the growing demand for critical minerals risks reproducing patterns of exploitation, expropriation, and expulsion. Using lithium ext…
In Press
A Topography of Effective Climate Governance in Canada
Directors’ fiduciary duties in Canada include an obligation to identify and oversee management of the company’s climate-related risks and opportunities. The precise contours of these obligations need further articulation. Internationally adopted financial disclosure accounting standards and green and transition finance taxonomies help to clarify the reasonable expectations of regulators, investors, creditors, and other stakeholders in respect of …
The Externality of Discounted Externalities
This article addresses an unexplored problem in the externalities literature: the present value of future externalities. The problem arises because externalized costs and benefits occur in the future, and therefore should be discounted, yet discount rates used by corporate decision-makers are typically higher than the appropriate social discount rate. In simple terms, corporations discount the future too much, and therefore underproduce potential…
When Monopolists Union-Bust
This article clarifies standards for evaluating whether a firm’s unilateral labor market conduct (wage suppression) violates antitrust law. It begins by analyzing suppression of collective bargaining (union busting) as conduct that can violate Section 2 of the Sherman Act. This article is the first to argue that wage suppression can violate Section 2 if the conduct (1) harms the competitive process within a labor market and increases monopsony, (…
Transnational ESG
The European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) represent transformative developments in global ESG regulation. These ambitious mandates, core to the EU’s European Green Deal, impose significant environmental and human rights obligations not only on EU companies but also on thousands of non-EU firms—including US companies—with operations or business ties within …
ESG Backlash in the United States—Investor Concerns or “Red Scare”
The United States lags far behind its counterparts regarding regulation on ESG investing. Part of this delay stems from a perceived “ESG backlash,” which has contributed to the SEC’s reluctance to require industry to disclose ESG practices. The regulatory landscape has now shifted, with the SEC proposing two ESG-centric rules—the ESG Fund Disclosure Rule and the ESG Names Rule. Both rules have garnered numerous comments from academics, industry, …
The Color of Carbon
Devaluing Sustainability
The long-awaited European Supply Chain Act, known as the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), entered into force on July 25, 2024, has been criticized as a missed opportunity to advance more impactful protections for vulnerable stakeholders of global value chain capitalism. Concluding a lengthy, contested legislative process, the Directive’s adoption reflects the diverse trends that make up global value chain (GVC) governa…
Racialized Landscapes and Climate Adaptation Economies
This article examines how the enduring legacies of racial capitalism and discriminatory land policies shape climate vulnerability and adaptation in US cities, using Miami as a primary example. It highlights how flooding and heat waves disproportionately impact marginalized, historically disinvested neighborhoods, which are further threatened by displacement resulting from “climate gentrification.” Miami illustrates these dynamics, as affluent res…
Infrastructural (Dis)Entitlement
In Ontario’s far north, settler state authorities and extractive firms are engaged in coordinated tactics to gain ground amid a polarization in the positions of Indigenous leadership. Alongside a surging resistance, we also witness a resigned acceptance of critical minerals mining by some First Nations. Drawing on years of community-engaged research, I detail here the contemporary tactics of “infrastructural (dis)entitlement:” in this dynamic, in…
Introduction
The fundamental legal, normative, and politico-economic assumptions underpinning both competition law and administrative governance are in a period of considerable flux (Harris and Varellas 2020, 3; Britton-Purdy et al. 2020, 1801-02; Khan 2019; Rahman 2018). Past calls for a renewed economic analysis of law are striking a chord with present scholars. In this issue of the Journal of Law and Political Economy , we commence a specially edited serie…
The Color of Carbon
Climate change is a direct consequence of capitalism’s drive to maximize profits through the unbridled extraction of wealth from humans and nature, aided and abetted at every turn by law. In its voracious demand for cheap labor, cheap raw materials, and cheap waste disposal, capitalism has created a treadmill of fossil fuel–dependent production and consumption that has triggered a planetary emergency. It has also produced extreme economic inequal…
Ignorance Is Strength
This article discusses the Orwellian nature of the current debate about the role of climate change in corporate governance, by juxtaposing the arguments of climate-denying commentators about corporate governance against the objective facts. Settled law allows corporations and institutional investors to take into account risk factors like climate change and may require them to consider those risks when they are directly material, as climate change…
Introduction—Corporate and Securities Law Responses to Climate Change
Global warming not only poses an existential problem for humans and the natural world, but also a fundamental challenge for businesses and the laws governing them. While only a few years ago, the climate crisis was considered separate from—even irrelevant to—corporate and securities law, it is now an urgent subject in both fields. In this special issue of the Journal of Law and Political Economy , we present new research at the intersection of co…
The Intellectual Origins of the Modern International Tax Regime
In March 1923, a group of prominent political economists and tax law experts gathered in Geneva, Switzerland to discuss the post–World War I framework for a new international tax regime. Commissioned by the League of Nations, these experts produced a comprehensive report that gradually became the intellectual foundation of the modern international tax regime. Relying on archival materials and other primary sources, this article contends that the …
Learning Like a State
What does it mean to sense, see, and act like a state in the digital age? We examine the changing phenomenology, governance, and capacity of the state in the era of big data and machine learning. Our argument is threefold. First, what we call the dataist state may be less accountable than its predecessor, despite its promise of enhanced transparency and accessibility. Second, a rapid expansion of the data collection mandate is fueling a transform…
Legal Predistribution, Market Justice, and Dedemocratization
In the face of today's twin crises of inequality and threats to democracy, many are turning to the work of Karl Polanyi and Thomas Piketty. Both have written magisterial volumes on the historical dynamics, social depredations, and risks to democracy endemic to market capitalism. This and a companion article look at each individual thinker and put the two into dialogue, with the goal of generating principles of a new democratic political economy. …
A Message from the Managing Editor
A message from the Managing Editor of the Journal of Law and Political Economy
Privileging Consolidation and Proscribing Cooperation
Democratic and Republican administrations and the Supreme Court, in implementing antitrust law as “a consumer welfare prescription” over the past 40 years, reached a consensus on two important issues. First, antitrust enforcers and courts have presumed that corporate mergers generally advance, or at least do not threaten, consumer welfare. Second, enforcers and courts have treated horizontal collusion, among both big and small actors, as the prin…
Climate Change, Race, and Migration
This article examines the relationship among climate change, racial subordination, and the capitalist world economy through the framework of racial capitalism. It argues that climate change is a logical consequence of an economic system based on extraction, accumulation through dispossession, and white supremacy. Climate change imposes disproportionate burdens on racialized communities all over the world, many of whom will be expelled from their …
A Labor Theory of Negotiation
This article argues that Mary Parker Follett developed a socialist theory of negotiation in response to early twentieth century labor struggle (at least if socialism means the democratization of economic life). This defining feature of Follett’s work has been forgotten amongst negotiation scholars; indeed, it appears never to have been acknowledged, even as Follett remains an icon in the contemporary field. Prominent negotiation scholars have ins…
Law and Political Economy in a Time of Accelerating Crises
In this time of accelerating crises nationally and worldwide, conventional understandings of the relationships among state, market, and society and their regulation through law are inadequate. In this Editors’ Introduction to Volume 1, Issue 1 of the Journal of Law and Political Economy , we reflect on our current historical moment, identify genealogies of the Law and Political Economy (LPE) project, articulate some of the intellectual foundation…
Different Paths
A critical perspective on law and political economy requires an appreciation not only of how race, gender, sexuality, class, national origin, immigrant status, and other aspects of our identities intersect and interact, but also why they do so. Focusing on the United States as a settler colonial state, this essay suggests that the primary markers of identity used to oppress people are themselves the master’s tools, i.e., constructs of the colonia…
Learning Like a State
What does it mean to sense, see, and act like a state in the digital age? We examine the changing phenomenology, governance, and capacity of the state in the era of big data and machine learning. Our argument is threefold. First, what we call the dataist state may be less accountable than its predecessor, despite its promise of enhanced transparency and accessibility. Second, a rapid expansion of the data collection mandate is fueling a transform…
Economic Democracy at Work
Workers should have representation on corporate boards of directors in the United States. Employees are key stakeholders whose contribution is necessary for the success of innovative enterprises. In contrast to the “shareholder primacy” theory of corporate governance, which claims that only shareholders should have decision-making authority, the argument made here is that also granting employees a voice on the corporate board will have positive e…
ClassCrits Time? Building Institutions, Building Frameworks
This essay chronicles the development of ClassCrits, an organization of US legal scholars that seeks to ground economic analyses in progressive legal jurisprudence. Today, ClassCrits ideas may resonate with a broader audience. I attribute this institutional success partly to ClassCrits’ commitment to: an interdisciplinary “big tent” openness, safe and responsive space, and praxis and collaboration. I then explore three key topics in a selection o…
Milton’s Paradise
The paper presents a critical examination of dominant representations of Hong Kong in free-market and neoliberal thought, focusing on the popular economics of Milton Friedman and the Manichean worldview of the Mont Pèlerin Society. Friedman and his fellow Mont Pèlerinians sanctified Hong Kong as an original and immaculate site of laissez-faire governance, projecting a stylized, selective, and minimally documented vision of a free-market paradise …
Modern Money Theory and International Law
This essay examines an emerging epistemological conjuncture between what might loosely be identified as two (primarily) academic camps: economists subscribing to “modern money theory” (MMT) and international lawyers associated with “critical” traditions within the discipline. For many legal scholars, my sense is that their current experience with MMT varies from “I think I have heard of that before” to “that state theory to money that pushes for …
The Regulatory Roots of Inequality in America
Why has US income inequality surged to unprecedented heights since the 1970s? The rise in inequality was not simply the natural result of differential rates of return but was powerfully driven by politics and policy. This article explores the underlying mechanisms with a focus on market governance, including corporate governance, financial regulation, labor relations, antitrust, sector-specific regulation, and intellectual property rights. Firms …
Economic Law
This article revisits the improbable concept of “economic law,” which originated in early- and mid-twentieth-century debates in search of a magical triad: a legal-political framework for a capitalist economy under democratic control. In analyzing its composite elements both in retrospect and in the current pandemic context, it becomes obvious how the elements generate complicated, potentially destructive dynamics with one another. The recently re…
Introduction
Peer-reviewed
The Road to Free-Market Family Policy
This essay investigates and ultimately rejects the claim that the United States’ comparatively heavily reliance on markets over government to provide the resources that families need is a natural outgrowth of the country’s longstanding veneration of capitalism. In tracing the nation’s economic ideology over time, it demonstrates that, at least until the end of the twentieth century, the constant in US history has not been the expectation of a fre…
Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market
The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is an indictment of the political structures that have created and maintain socioeconomic inequality in
What Do Franchisees Do? Vertical Restraints as Workplace Fissuring and Labor Discipline Devices
Applying a simple model to a data set created from 530 franchise contracts, this article shows that the loosening of antitrust restrictions on vertical restraints—competition restrictions in agreements between firms at different levels of the production and distribution process—allows trademarked brands to control wages and working conditions across the boundaries of the firm, at legally separate franchised establishments. Some vertical restraint…
Prudence and the Use and Abuse of the New Learning About Salience
We have learned that tax policy preferences are sensitive to how questions are presented to voters (their salience). If one believes, reasonably, that there is also evidence that voters do not vote for their preferred tax policy, then manipulating salience could help voters arrive at their preferred outcome. Such manipulation has been strongly criticized as not only impinging on voter autonomy as to their legitimate policy preferences, but also l…
Roma Workers under Czech Racial Capitalism
This article contributes to the theory of racial capitalism by focusing on racialization of labor in the post-socialist context. Drawing on fieldwork conducted with Roma workers in the city of Ostrava, the Czech Republic, the paper investigates the role of the Czech state in confining Roma to low-paid, precarious and informal work—and how dynamics of racialization figure in this relationship. State policies like job placement programs, I claim, e…
Better Than Jail
Racialized mass incarceration enables forms of economic exploitation that evade traditional worker protections despite being integrated into conventional labor markets. Such exploitation is legitimated by normalizing incarceration as the baseline against which these practices are judged. In contrast, conventional social policy imagines an “economy” separate from state violence, opposing “free labor” to “involuntary servitude.” The emergent “carce…
Bound by the Economic Constitution
The aspiration of this article is to start a conversation about the possible contribution of a Law and Political Economy research agenda in Europe. I first unpack the role of law in structuring the economy at the supranational level by examining the legacy of ordoliberalism and the Economic Constitution of the EU as the normative project of insulating the internal market from political contestation. I then attempt to map the critical approaches t…
Stripping the Gears of White Supremacy
In recent decades, states and municipalities have increasingly relied on court fines and fees to overcome budget shortfalls. Existing literature underscores the varied and adverse impacts of court debt, as well as the disproportionate incidence of such debt on people of color and poor people of all races. Yet, few pieces of scholarship directly link increased imposition of court fines and fees to decreased dependence on traditional progressive ta…
Situating the Inter-American Human Rights System in the Oscillation of International Law
This article considers the Inter-American Human Rights System (IAHRS) as a response to the general assessments of some critical scholarship on international law. It employs the concept of “oscillation of international law” to organize different views of the international human rights and environmental law (IHREL) scholarship, two legal regimes that speak loudest to the IAHRS’ interests. These views are distributed within a spectrum that goes from…
Dedication
A tribute to founding Advisory Board member Sally Engle Merry
Commodified Justice and American Penal Form
This article seeks to analyze American penal law, ideology, and culture through the lens of Marxist theories of commodification and commodity fetishism. It first introduces the “first-order commodification of justice,” that is, the positing of a quantitative equivalence between offense and punishment. Next, it introduces the “second-order commodification of justice,” that is, the notion that the benefits of a particular penal regime can be reckon…