What is Capitalism?

Discussion with Jessica A. Shoemaker and James Fallows Tierney featuring their co-authored article, Trading Acres (Yale Law Journal 2025-26).

Discussion with Eric Scorsone and Fabrizio Esposito on The Doctrinal Myth of the Efficient Breach in the Overbid Scenario: Unduly Reducing Expected Performance to Expected Profit.

Discussion with Katherine Moos, University of Massachusetts Amherst Economics & Co-Director, Program on Gender and Care Work, Political Economy Research Institute, on her work titled “Trump’s Care Agenda: the re-regulation of racialized and gendered labor."

November 15, 2024 Fernando Loayza Jordán presented his paper, on democracy and taxation, Contesting the Neoliberal Social Contract.  

October 25, 2024 David Ciepley presented his article Democracy and the Corporation: The Long View, Annual Review of Political Science 26:489–517 (2023) with comments by James J. Varellas, UC Berkeley.

March 1, 2024  Ramsi Woodcock, Wyatt, Tarrant & Combs Associate Professor of Law, Secondary Appointment, Gatton College of Business & Economics University of Kentucky, led a discussion on his article, " A Progressive Critique of the Law and Political Economy Movement" (rescheduled from January 12, 2023)

December 1, 2023 Jessica A. Shoemaker, Steinhart Foundation Distinguished Professor of Law at Nebraska College of Law, led a discussion of her article, “Re-Placing Property,” University of Chicago Law Review 91 (forthcoming 2024).

November 3, 2023 Paige Carmichael, PhD student in Economics at UMass Amherst, led a discussion of disability, work, and capitalism.

September 29, 2023 Scott Carter, Professor of Economics at the University of Tulsa, led a discussion of his work on Sraffa.

June 30, 2023 Andrea Leiter, Faculty of Law, University of Amsterdam led a discussion of her book, Making the World Safe for Investment: The Protection of Foreign Property 1922-1959 (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

June 23, 2023 Sanjay Reddy, Professor of Economics at the New School, led a discussion of his article, “Beyond Property or Beyond Piketty?,”British Journal of Sociology, 72, 1 (January 2021), 8-25.

May 5, 2023 Reshard Kolabhai, Lecturere at North-West University, South Africa led a discussion of his work-in-progress, “Law in Movement: Constitutional Law, Indigenous Customs, and Capitalism in South Africa.”

March 3, 2023 Branden Adams, Lecturer in History at University of California Santa Barbara, led a discussion of his work-in-progress, “Coal and Capitalism: From Railroads and Miners’ Unions to Senator Manchin’s Climate Politics.”

February 10, 2023 Jamee Moudud, Professor of Economics at Sarah Lawrence College, led a discussion of Kai Koddenbrock, Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, and Ndongo Samba Sylla, “Beyond Financialisation: The Longue Durée of Finance and Production in the Global South,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 46 (2002), 703-733.

January 13, 2023 Amna Akbar, Professor of Law at Ohio State University, led a discussion on her working paper rethinking law’s emancipatory potential in the context of racial capitalism.

November 18, 2022 Carol Heim, Professor Emerita of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, led a discussion of a chapter from Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Harvard University Press, 2005), with a focus on Chapter 2, "Manhattan for Twenty-Four Dollars," pp. 49-84.

March 25, 2022 Diana Reddy, doctoral candidate in UC Berkeley's Jurisprudence and Social Policy program, led a discussion of her paper, “The Twenty-First Century Legitimacy of Labor Unions: After the Law of Apolitical Economy.”

March 4, 2022 Faisal Chaudhry, Assistant Professor of Law and History, University of Dayton led a discussion on property as rent centered his recent paper examining mortgage securitization and ideas about property.

November 19, 2021 Daniel J.H. Greenwood, Professor of Law at Hofstra University, led a discussion of his article, “Introduction to the Metaphors of Corporate Law,” 4 Seattle Journal for Social Justice 273 (2005).

November 5, 2021 Margaret Levenstein, Director of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), and Research Professor at the University of Michigan, discussed her article “Escape from Equilibrium: Thinking Historically About Firm Responses to Competition,” Enterprise and Society, vol. 13, no. 4 (Dec. 2012), pp. 710-728.

September 10, 2021 Michael C. Duff, Winston S. Howard Distinguished Professor at University of Wyoming Law, led a discussion of his draft article about workplace injury and illness, worker’s constitutional rights to protection, and what this shows about the legal underpinnings of capitalism.

August 20, 2021 Sarah Haan, Professor at the Washington and Lee University School of Law, led a discussion of her article, “Corporate Governance and the Feminization of Capital,” forthcoming in the Stanford Law Review.

June 25, 2021 Kim Christensen, Professor of Economics at Sarah Lawrence College, and Martha McCluskey, Professor Emerita at University at Buffalo Law School, led a discussion of about the property rights movement. Readings focused on the U.S. Supreme Court case, Cedar Point Nursery vs. Hassid.

May 21, 2021 Ruth Dukes, Professor of Labour Law at the University of Glasgow, led a discussion of her paper “The Economic Sociology of Labour Law,” Journal of Law and Society, 2019.

Jamee Moudud, Professor of Economics at Sarah Lawrence College, led a discussion of his paper on how racial capitalism was built into the legal and political design of central banking and taxation in the British Empire.

February 26, 2021 Marilyn Power, Professor Emerita of Economics at Sarah Lawrence College, led a discussion on feminist insights into the law and political economy of capitalism.

January 29, 2021 Dr. Dimitri Van Den Meerssche (PhD EUI, LL.M. NYU), an associate fellow at the Asser Institute and a postdoctoral research fellow at Edinburgh Law School, led a discussion of Julie E. Cohen, Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism (Oxford Univ. Press 2019), chapter 2, “The Biopolitical Public Domain.”

December 18, 2020 Jamee Moudud, Professor of Economics at Sarah Lawrence College, led a discussion of two short readings on W.E.B. Dubois’s important contributions to institutional economics and political economy.

November 20, 2020 Carol E. Heim, Professor Emerita of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, led a discussion of Jonathan Levy, "Accounting for Profit and the History of Capital," Critical Historical Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Fall 2014), 171-214 and Carol E. Heim, "Capitalism," in Dictionary of American History, 3rd ed., vol. 2, Cabeza to Demography, ed. Stanley I. Kutler […]

October 23, 2020 Eric Scorsone, Director, and Sarah S. Klammer, Academic Specialist, both of the MSUE Center for Local Government Finance and Policy at Michigan State University, led a discussion about the work of John Commons, an early twentieth-century expert in law and economics from an institutionalist perspective.