Law and Political Economy Collective

What is Capitalism? Reading & Discussion Group
March 28, 2025 at 3 pm ET
A discussion with Paul Cammack, University of Manchester, featuring his article, Politics and Political Economy of Post-Reproduction Societies.
Register here.

Law and Political Economy Meets Heterodox Economics: Power, Freedom, Institutions, and the Law
2025-04-12 21:07 - 22:07 (Africa/Abidjan)
Saturday, April 12, 2025
9:00am–5:00pm ET
Yale Law School
127 Wall Street, New Haven, CT 06511
At our Spring 2025 workshop, we seek to feature multi-disciplinary and intersectional emerging scholarship reflecting on the relationships between politics, law, and economics, and society. We welcome papers both on and beyond the general workshop theme of “Power, Freedom, Institutions, and the Law.”
Students and emerging scholars interested in presenting law-and-political-economy-informed analysis of class, gender, race, imperialism, and more, are welcome to submit a 100–300 word abstract with titles by March 15, 2025, via the following link: https://bit.ly/4b0hAxa. In keeping with a commitment to methodological pluralism, research utilizing quantitative or qualitative methods, analytic or institutional approaches, and other techniques from a variety of disciplines, will all be considered. We are especially interested in soliciting abstracts that cut across disciplinary lines involving economics, law and institutionalism, politics, history, etc.
We encourage proposals and projects at every stage of their development; completed papers are not necessary at the time of the workshop. If you are unsure if your proposal fits the submission guidelines, please do not hesitate to contact the organizers by mailing to appeal@politicaleconomylaw.org.
The workshop will begin with a plenary panel on Third World internationalism today, and a masterclass on methods in law and political economy.
If you are interested in presenting or attending, please note that, while the workshop is free of charge and will include lunch and refreshments, we are unfortunately unable to provide support for travel or lodging.
Co-organizers and Sponsors:
The Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and the Law (APPEAL), a program of the LPE Collective;
Yale Law and Political Economy Student Group;
John Jay College Economics Department;
John Jay College Law and Political Economy Society;
With New School for Social Research students and faculty; and
UMass Amherst LPE Group

What is Capitalism? Reading & Discussion Group
2025-05-09 14:00 - 15:00 (America/New_York)
May 9, 2025 at 2 pm ET
Katherine Moos, University of Massachusetts Amherst Economics, will discuss her current book project.
Register here.

The Law and Political Economy of Social Reproduction
2025-05-21 09:00 - 18:00 (America/New_York)
This day-long workshop will be held in person at the University of Chicago on Wednesday, May 21st.
View the program here.
Read the call for papers at this link.

Law and Society Association Annual Meeting
2025-05-22 09:00 - 2025-05-25 14:00 (America/New_York)
View the program for the Law and Political Economy Collaborative Research Network at this link.

LPE Scholar Workshop
2025-07-08 15:00 - 18:30 (America/New_York)
Submit an abstract.
Download the below call for abstracts as a PDF.
This July, scholars of political economy will gather in Montreal just prior to the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) annual conference. In the spirit of fostering community and generating interdisciplinary discussion, the LPE Collective invites scholars to network, share their research, and receive feedback over an afternoon workshop to be held at McGill University’s Faculty of Law.
We welcome faculty, students, and emerging scholars interested in presenting their work to submit a 200-500 word abstract with title by Monday, June 2. Click here to submit an abstract. We are especially interested in soliciting abstracts that breach disciplinary lines involving law, economics, politics, history, and sociology. Scholars and others who are interested in participating as commentators are also invited to attend by letting us know at appeal@politicaleconomylaw.org.
Workshop leaders will include Leanna Katz, Eric George, and Martha McCluskey.
We encourage proposals and projects at every stage of their development; completed papers are not necessary at the time of the workshop. If you are unsure if your proposal fits the submission guidelines, please do not hesitate to contact the organizers at appeal@politicaleconomylaw.org.
The event will be followed by an opportunity to gather for drinks and dinner together at nearby location to be determined.
If you are interested in presenting or attending, please note that, while the workshop is free of charge, we are unfortunately unable to provide support for travel, lodging, or dinner.

Global Law and Political Economy Summer Academy
2025-07-14 09:00 - 2025-07-18 17:00 (Europe/Rome)
July 14 – July 18, 2025, Roccella Ionica, Italy
View the program.
Apply by 25 April 2025.
The Summer School offers an interactive, non-hierarchical, and focused mentorship and skill-building experience for students and faculty. It engages critically with the diverse considerations of political-economy-law while fostering democratic dialogue with local cultures.
The program spans three days:

Day 1: Roundtable and writing workshop sessions (workshops modelled on IGLP format);
Day 2: Case study focused on interactive, problem-based group learning, a focused master class, and a cultural excursion exploring local custom and history; and
Day 3: Lectures from high-profile judges at the intersection of policy, power and law as well as a career mentorship session.

The Summer Academy is a collaboration between the INET YSI FLE Working Group, the Law and Political Economy Collective (LPE-C), the Initiative for Global Law and Political Economy at the University of Manchester (iGLPE), the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (EAEPE), and the City of Roccella, Italy.
Application Details:
We invite graduate students (Masters or Ph.D. students or within three years of completing Ph.D.) interested in exploring questions of law and political economy to apply.

Funding: Partial travel stipends and shared accommodation provided.
How to Apply: Submit a 200-word abstract on a theme related to law and political economy; and CV (including any references) by 25 April 2025.
Accepted participants will be requested to submit a working paper for the writing workshop between 3000-8000 words no later than 1 June 2025.

For more information contact: christina@youngscholarsinitiative.org.

Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism: The End of Laissez Faire?
2025-07-30 10:00 - 11:30 (America/New_York)
Jamee Moudud’s new book, Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism: The End of Laissez Faire? draws on the Original Institutional Economics and American Legal Realist traditions to propose a theory of institutional political economy. Focusing on property, money and credit, constitutional law, and corporations, this book argues that laissez-faire has never existed and that “state intervention versus de-regulation” and “market failures versus free markets” are false dichotomies. Moudud’s book proposes the need to engage with legal-economic theory and history to understand what institutions are, what economic regulation means, how law is intrinsically connected to the economy, and how power relations are distributed within capitalism.
Join the author and commentators Anna Chadwick and John Haskell for a Zoom discussion of this recent book on July 30, 2025 at 10 am eastern.
Speakers
Jamee K. Moudud (PhD) is a Professor of Economics at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York. He is Co-Founder and Board Member of the Law and Political Economy Collective (LPE-C), on the Steering Committee of the Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and Law (APPEAL), and is also on the Editorial Board and a Co-Founder of the Journal of Law and Political Economy.
Anna Chadwick is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Glasgow School of Law. Anna’s monograph, Law and the Political Economy of Hunger, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019.
John Haskell is a Professor/Chair at University of Manchester Law School and a Faculty Member at Harvard Law School Institute for Global Law and Policy. At Manchester, he is Director of Manchester Law and Technology Initiative and Lead at Initiative for Global Law and Political Economy.

What is Capitalism? Reading & Discussion Group
2025-09-05 12:00 - 13:00 (America/New_York)
This session will discuss a working paper by Eric Scorsone and Fabrizio Esposito, The Doctrinal Myth of the Efficient Breach in the Overbid Scenario: Unduly Reducing Expected Performance to Expected Profit.
Register here.
In a contractual relationship, does the Promisor own the Promisee’s performance? If so, up to what extent? These questions are at the heart of contract law and contract law scholarship. The economic approach to law has long proposed a way to answer these questions, the so-called efficient breach. What do we owe when we break an existing contract to take advantage of a better deal? The authors argue that prominent economic analysis of breach of contract misunderstands the legal, moral, and practical aspects of contractual obligations and entitlements.
This session adds to our series of sessions over the last few years examining the legal complexities of basic economic concepts. The idea of voluntary market transactions for mutual gain is central to the logics of capitalism. Closer attention to how contract law and institutions shape transactions can clarify underlying assumptions and conflicts about who deserves what and why.
Eric Scorsone is Executive Director, Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service and Associate Professor of Public Policy by Courtesy, University of Virginia. He co-hosts the Legal-Economic Nexus Podcast with Sarah Klammer.
Fabrizio Esposito is Associate Professor of Private Law, NOVA School of Law and the Research & Development Centre in Law and Society in Lisbon, Portugal.
We’ll begin with a 10 minute introduction by the author, followed by extended conversation with participants.

Workshop: Heterodox Economics Meets Law and Political Economy: Reclaiming Democracy
2025-11-08 09:00 - 17:00 (America/New_York)
Register by October 30 at: https://bit.ly/LPE11825
HETERODOX ECONOMICS MEETS LAW AND POLITICAL ECONOMY:
RECLAIMING DEMOCRACY
John Jay College, 524 W 59th St New York, NY 10019 United States
Saturday, November 8, 2025
9:00am – 5:00 pm ET
Presentations by
Zephyr Teachout
Professor of Law, Fordham Law School
&
Kimberly Kracman
Associate Research Scholar, Princeton University
Roundtable with
Michelle Holder
Professor of Economics, John Jay College & Senior Fellow, Roosevelt Institute
Jessica Forden
Doctoral Student in Economics, The New School
Reshard Kolabhai
Doctoral Student, Yale Law School
Jonah Wolf
Doctoral Student in Economics, UMass Amherst
Moderated by
Jamee K. Moudud
Professor of Economics, Sarah Lawrence College
Paper Talks
Emerging Scholars
***
Co-organizers and sponsors:
The Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and the Law (APPEAL), a program of the LPE Collective; John Jay College Economics Department; John Jay College Law and Political Economy Society; and UMass Amherst LPE Group
Register by October 30 at: https://bit.ly/LPE11825

What is Capitalism? Reading & Discussion Group with Jessica A. Shoemaker and James Fallows Tierney
2025-11-21 15:00 - 16:00 (America/New_York)
REGISTER HERE
What is Capitalism? Reading & Discussion Group
Discussion with Jessica A. Shoemaker and James Fallows Tierney featuring their co-authored article, Trading Acres (forthcoming in Yale Law Journal 2025-26).
Excerpt from the co-authors’ abstract:
Farmland’s conversion into an asset class threatens rural livelihoods, agriculture and food system resilience, economic and spatial justice, and—in our final estimation—democracy itself.
… [H]istorically, investor-owned farmland was seen as a deep and politically motivating threat to rural life. In this Article, we argue that Wall Street’s arrival at rural America’s gate is not merely a market trend but rather the product of deep social choices governing the accumulation of investor wealth: property, corporate, and securities law. We explore the ways in which these deep structures of our legal system—from the primacy of market logics to a range of biases that skew our spatial, temporal, and social relations— constitute the conditions for this profound transformation in the way farmland, as a basic and essential rural resource, is being integrated into the modern capital economy.
Jessica A. Shoemaker is Steinhart Foundation Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Nebraska College of Law.
James Fallows Tierney is Associate Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Chicago-Kent College of Law.
A draft of the article is available on SSRN here.
REGISTER HERE

What is Capitalism? Reading & Discussion Group with Joanna Kusiak
2026-01-23 10:00 - 11:30 (America/New_York)
What is Capitalism? Reading & Discussion Group
Join Joanna Kusiak for a discussion of her book, Radically Legal: Berlin Constitutes the Future,Cambridge University Press (2024) https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009516914. The book reflects on an activist housing campaign that used constitutional protections for property rights to expropriate urban apartments owned by corporate speculators. Professor Kusiak is a Junior Research Fellow at King’s College, University of Cambridge.
To register, scroll down on this page and click the green “Register Now” button.

ClassCrits XV
2026-03-20 09:00 - 2026-03-21 18:00 (America/New_York)
Click here to submit a proposal!
Download the Call for Proposals, Papers & Participation
ClassCrits XV
CALL FOR PROPOSALS, PAPERS & PARTICIPATION
When: March 20 – 21, 2026
Where: Mitchell Hamline School of Law, Saint Paul, MN
Submission Deadline: December 15, 2025
Proposal Types: Individual Presentations, Panels, Junior Scholar Works-in-Progress
Conference Theme: Making Progress in a Regressive Era
Since the beginning of the Twenty-First Century, advances made for equity in the workplace and in society have faced backlash from the courts, legislatures, and the executive branch at the federal, state, and local levels. The successful legal challenges to measures put in place to ensure that people of color, women, and other disadvantaged and historically discriminated populations are given equal treatment have led to an almost complete destruction of those measures.
Plaintiffs have won by claiming that any actions to ensure that members of equally qualified but historically disadvantaged groups are not overlooked is in fact discrimination against white, cis, heterosexual males. These backward-looking moves have been reflected in both judicial decisions and in state and local legislation that restricts autonomy and undermines the long-standing fight for equality. It has been exacerbated by the current administration’s bullying of institutions of higher education and law firms. Examples include:

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, and 303 Creative v. Elenis, as well as the recent decisions of Skrmetti v. U.S. and Mahmoud v. Taylor have severely eroded the rights of women and marginalized groups.
Schools such as the University of Pennsylvania as well as top law firms have capitulated to the bullying, though others have refused to acquiesce.
Legislation building on a newfound freedom to discriminate have been successful in reversing the gains made by disadvantaged groups who seek full participation in the American Dream.
In yet an even more extreme regressive step, the Supreme Court in Dept of Homeland Security v. DVD severely eroded the Due Process rights of all peoples residing in the United States. The administration led by convicted felon Donald Trump is now targeting for deportation people of color, regardless of their residency status. Indeed, it now threatens denaturalization or rendition of its critics and political enemies.

These activities fortify a theocratic movement with regard to the First Amendment to the point of weaponizing it; any action which adversely affects Christian sects is declared infringing on their religious freedom, even when they are operating in the stream of commerce, or when they wish to use public funds for religious education, or when a woman’s right to bodily autonomy is inapposite to their religious beliefs.
Advocates for regressive policies and laws long for the days when they were judged by the color of their skin (white), their gender (male), and their sexuality (heterosexual), rather than their abilities, as witnessed by the recent confirmation of a white supremist, wholly unqualified and utterly incompetent heterosexual white man to serve as Secretary of Defense. As further evidence of this deterioration, through a series of Executive Orders, the current administration has undermined efforts to end discriminatory practices.
The Civil Rights Era of the mid-Twentieth Century, whose reforms were designed to bring about equality of opportunity, has come crashing down, along with many of the foundations of our Democracy.
In the face of all of this, we must find new paths to continue to progress — or at a minimum prevent further backsliding — in the face of these regressive policies, laws, and court decisions. Class Crits XV seeks presenters and participants who wish to be part of this discussion.
We invite the following submissions:

Individual Proposals

Individual paper proposals should include a title and short abstract, along with the presenter’s name, contact information, institutional affiliation (if any), and a short speaker bio (1-3 sentences). Individual papers (other than works-in-progress submissions, see below) will be grouped by the conference organizers into panels.

Panel Proposals

Panel proposals may use a variety of formats, including traditional paper presentations, roundtables, and audience discussions. Please indicate the format of the proposed panel, and include a proposed panel title, a short description of the overall topic, and a list of confirmed panelists, with contact information. For panels comprised of individual presentations, please include titles and short summaries of each presentation and a short bio (1-3 sentences) for each panelist or panel organizer.

Works in Progress

We extend a special invitation to junior scholars (i.e., graduate students, aspiring faculty members, or faculty members with less than two years of experience in a full-time position) to submit proposals for works in progress (WIPs). A senior scholar as well as other scholars will comment upon each work in progress in a small, supportive working session. Due to the increasing popularity of our WIPs program, we will be limiting the number of WIPS at this year’s conference to twelve (12) papers. Works-in-progress submissions should be clearly identified as “Work-in-Progress” and should include a title, short abstract, name and contact information, and a 1-3 sentence bio identifying the author’s current status as a student or new or aspiring faculty member. Scholars submitting WIPs who are not selected to workshop their paper may have the opportunity to participate on a regular conference panel. We anticipate selecting WIP papers addressing topics with which ClassCrits members have expertise. Priority will also be given to WIP authors who are committed to the ClassCrits community.
Please upload your submissions for consideration by December 15, 2025 at the following link: https://www.conftool.org/classcrits-xv/
