A Law and Political Economy Podcast with Matias Guiloff
When we watch a film, our eyes go to the foreground: the hero, the villain, the love story. Yet behind every scene is a background we rarely notice, and that is quietly shaping what happens in front of it.
Markets work in a similar way. Orthodox economics teaches us to treat the economy as something natural, a space where free individuals simply meet and trade. Law and Political Economy, or LPE, starts from a different place. It holds that markets are made by law, through the rules of property, contract, and family. These are the background rules that decide who has to bargain, who can walk away, and who bears the losses.
The title of this podcast comes from Robert Hale, an American legal realist who argued, a century ago, that the so called “free” market is full of coercion, because the law decides what each of us can withhold from others. Therefore, if you change the background rules, you also change who wins and who loses. This is the question at the heart of Law and Political Economy: law, power, and distribution.
Why use films to explain Law and Political Economy? Because cinema is a potent medium for showing worlds, and every world has rules. Films are unusually good at unveiling the effects and personal stories that textbooks make abstract. And films also shape how we imagine markets, power and the rules that structure them.
Therefore, in each episode of this podcast, we’ll take one film and do something a little unusual. We’ll look past the foreground and ask what’s happening in the background.
This podcast is brought to you by the Law and Political Economy Collective, recorded at Fresco Fresco, and produced by Ventura, with original music composed by Sergio Valenzuela.
Episode Guests:
Diogo R. Couthino is Professor of Economic Law and Political Economy at University of São Paulo.
Rocio Lorca Ferreccio is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminal Sicences at Unversidad de Chile Faculty of Law.
For this first episode, I have chosen Nomadland, Chloé Zhao’s 2020 Academy Award winning film about Fern, a woman in her sixties who takes to the road in a van after the town she has lived all her life disappears.It’s a film about freedom. Or at least, that’s what it appears in the foreground. Fern lives in a van and answers to no landlord and no boss for long. She insists that she is not homeless, just houseless. Similarly, many of the nomads she meets along the way describe their life as a liberation from debt, mortgages, and from a society that measures people by what they own. However, this picture can change considerably if you look at the background. Fern is on the road because the plant in Empire, Nevada, closed, and the company town closed with it. She earns her living through seasonal work: packing boxes in an Amazon warehouse at Christmas, harvesting beets, cleaning campgrounds. In other words, her freedom begins where her pension, her housing, and her job ended.This is exactly where Law and Political Economy has something to say. Following Robert Hale, it can be argued that freedom in a market isn’t simply the absence of constraint. It depends on what the law lets you keep, and what you have to give up to survive. The freedom to move, which Fern doubtlessly has, is very different from the freedom to refuse. In this episode, the main question that professors Rocío Lorca (Universidad de Chile Law School) and Diogo Rosenthal Coutinho (Universidad de São Paulo Law School) will address is: What is freedom? And, honoring an idea so central to Robert Hale’s thinking: What is coercion?