What is Capitalism? Reading & Discussion Group #31
September 27, 2024
Frank Pasquale, a co-founder and former Board member of APPEAL, is Professor of Law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School led the discussion of his recent article The New Antitrust, co-authored with Michael L. Cederblom and published at 33 U.S.C. Interdisciplinary L.J. 235 (2023).

What is Capitalism? Reading & Discussion Group #32
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.

Queering the Right-Wing Constitution? Trans Litigation and "Parents' Rights"
2024-10-30 17:00 - 18:00 (America/Halifax)
This fall, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in United States v. Skrmetti, a case that challenges Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for transgender people under 18. At the same time, anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation is proliferating across the country, with over 500 bills currently under consideration.
In a judiciary system deeply influenced by a right-wing worldview, how should constitutional scholars and advocates approach litigating for trans rights? How do we understand trans rights, not just within the frame of identity and equality, but also within the frame of political economy, freedom, and human flourishing? This panel seeks to address these questions.
Moderator: Kyle Velte, Associate Dean for Faculty, Professor, and Karelitz Chair in Evidence Law, University of Kansas School of Law
Panelists:
Meredith Taylor Brown, Assistant Attorney General – Civil Rights Bureau, Office of the New York State Attorney General
Mary Anne Case, Arnold I. Shure Professor of Law, the University of Chicago Law School

Hila Keren, Paul E. Treusch Professor of Law, Southwestern Law School
Commentator: Craig Konnoth, Martha Lubin Karsh and Bruce A. Karsh Bicentennial Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law

What is Capitalism? Reading & Discussion Group #33
November 15, 2024
Fernando Loayza Jordán presented his paper, on democracy and taxation, Contesting the Neoliberal Social Contract.

What is Capitalism? Reading & Discussion Group
December 6, 2024 at 3 pm ET
A discussion with Diana Reddy on her forthcoming article, Transaction Benefits at Work: Regulating the Future of Work for the Future of Society.
Click here to register.

Fair Shake Book Talk
December 12, 2024
2 pm ET
Zoom
Naomi Cahn, June Carbone, and Nancy Levit will discuss their new book, Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy.
Click here to register.

ClassCrits Annual Meeting
December 12, 3pm ET
All Members, non-members, past participants and friends of ClassCrits are welcome to attend and share ideas and feedback for future activities.
For those who are available and interested, we encourage you to also attend the online discussion with Naomi Cahn, June Carbone, and Nancy Levit of their new book Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy just prior to the meeting at 2 pm.

APPEAL Annual Meeting
December 12, 3pm ET
All Members, non-members, past participants and friends of APPEAL are welcome to attend and share ideas and feedback for future activities.
For those who are available and interested, we encourage you to also attend the online discussion with Naomi Cahn, June Carbone, and Nancy Levit of their new book Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy just prior to the meeting at 2 pm.

ClassCrits VIII: The New Corporatocracy and Election 2016
The 8th Annual ClassCrits conference, held at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, Chicago, IL featured scholarship on the theme “The New Corporatocracy and Election 2016.”

Conference Materials:

2016 Call for Papers

2017 Western New England Law Review symposium (vol. 39, no. 4)

Critical/Political Economy Happy Hour at AALS
4:30 – 6:30 pm

Novela, 662 Mission Street, San Francisco

Co-sponsored by the Critical Legal Collective, the LPE Collective, the LPE Project, and the Race and Private Law Section

What is Capitalism? Reading & Discussion Group
January 24, 2025 at 3 pm ET
Professor Akbar Rasulov, University of Glasgow Law, will lead a discussion of Duncan Kennedy’s classic article, The Role of Law in Economic Thought: Essays on the Fetishism of Commodities, 34 American University Law Review 939 (1985).
Register here.

What is Capitalism? Reading & Discussion Group
2025-02-28 15:00 - 16:00 (Africa/Abidjan)
February 28, 2025 at 3 pm ET
A discussion with Kimberly Kracman on her article, Code as Constitution: The Negotiation of a Uniform Accounting Code for U.S. Railway Corporations and the Moral Justification of Stakeholder Claims on Wealth, Critical Perspectives on Accounting.
Register here.

What is Capitalism? Reading & Discussion Group
2025-03-28 20:59 - 21:59 (Africa/Abidjan)
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)
Friday, Jan. 23, 2026 at 10 am ET (UTC-5) / 15:00 GMT
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.

What is Capitalism? Reading & Discussion Group with Zoe Sherman
2026-02-20 15:00 - 16:30 (America/New_York)
Friday, Feb. 20, 2026 at 3 pm ET (UTC-5) / 20:00 GMT

What is Capitalism? Reading & Discussion Group
Zoe Sherman will present her work in progress, Capital, Trademark, and the Properties of Intellect. The paper is part of a project exploring capitalism and the marketplace of ideas, building on the author’s expertise in connecting economics and culture. REGISTER HERE to receive the zoom link and the reading.
Zoe Sherman is a political economist and economic historian. She holds a Ph.D. from UMass-Amherst, was a professor of economics at Merrimack College for 10 years, and has been a member of the Dollars & Sense collective since 2014. She is the author of Modern Advertising and the Market for Audience Attention: The US Advertising Industry’s Turn-or-the-Twentieth Century Transition (Routledge 2020). Her recent writing for Dollars & Sense is available here.

Pre-LSA 2026 Workshop on Law & Political Economy: Reconstructing State Capacity
2026-05-27 09:00 - 17:00 (America/New_York)
Reconstructing State Capacity
Pre-LSA 2026 Workshop on Law & Political Economy
May 27, 2026,University of CaliforniaBerkeley, California

Programme

Call for Papers

We are pleased to announce a one-day workshop on Reconstructing State Capacity, to be held on May 27, 2026, at the University of California, Berkeley. The workshop will take place immediately prior to the Law and Society Association’s 2026 Annual Meeting in San Francisco (May 28–31, 2026) and is organized by the LSA Law and Political Economy Collaborative Research Network (CRN 55), the LPE Collective, and the Global LPE Network in collaboration with the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative.

Workshop Theme
In recent years, questions of state capacity have returned to the center of sociolegal and political economy scholarship. Across diverse contexts, the functions of the state have become increasingly contested and reworked. Governing capacity is expanded and intensified in some domains, while deliberately curtailed, dismantled, or redirected in others, often in ways that reflect shifting political coalitions, economic interests, and struggles over authority. Yet “state capacity” is frequently invoked as if it were a fixed or technical attribute, something states either possess or lack, rather than a politically contingent and historically produced achievement that must be continuously assembled and sustained.
This workshop starts from the premise that state capacity is shaped and contested through multiple, intersecting processes in which law plays a central mediating role. Legal rules, institutions, and vocabularies organize administrative power, structure enforcement, and reallocate authority across public and private actors. Through these processes, law legitimates coercion, withdrawal, or redistribution. At the same time, law is also a site through which state capacity is hollowed out, fragmented, selectively redeployed or strategically reconfigured to manage competing demands and institutional contradictions– often in ways that intensify inequality, shift risks onto households and communities, and entrench new forms of dependence and control.
We invite papers that examine state capacity as a relational phenomenon situated within law and political economy and produced through ongoing struggles among states, markets, and societies. Such struggles unfold across legal fields, spatial scales, and historical moments, generating uneven and often contradictory forms of governing capacity. Rather than treating the state as a unitary or coherent actor, the workshop encourages analyses that foreground the legal techniques, organizational practices, and social conflicts through which governing capacity is assembled, undermined, and reconfigured. We also welcome analyses of how states navigate and operationalize internal tensions—between market and plan, formal law and informal authority, domestic sovereignty and transnational integration—as productive dimensions of governance rather than failures of coherence.
Topics of Interest
We welcome papers on a wide range of topics related to law, political economy, and state capacity, including but not limited to:

Legal foundations and transformations of state capacity in different political economies
Industrial policy, regulation, and the legal infrastructures of economic governance
Privatization, outsourcing, and the deconstruction or redistribution of public authority
State capacity, corporate power, and mechanisms of regulatory capture
Law, coercion, and repression as instruments or dimensions of governing capacity
State capacity and social provision, welfare, and redistribution
Citizenship, migration control, and border governance
Crisis governance, emergency powers, and forms of legal exceptionalism
Comparative, transnational, and postcolonial perspectives on state capacity and its variation across time and space
Non-Western modalities of state capacity, including hybrid forms that combine market governance with political monopoly, and the strategic appropriation of Western legal knowledge
Tensions between state capacity and regime legitimacy, including how states manage contradictions between economic governance and political authority

About the Global Law and Political Economy Series
The Global Law and Political Economy Workshop is an annual one-day event bringing together LPE scholars from around the world to explore central themes at the intersection of law, political economy, and social change. Held the day before the LSA Annual Meeting, the workshop creates a dedicated space for sustained discussion and exchange. Each year, the workshop is organized around a thematic focus that reflects pressing questions in the field. Past editions have examined the law and political economy of social reproduction (Chicago, 2025) and this year’s workshop is focused on the topic of the reconstruction of state capacity (Berkeley, 2026). The 2027 workshop will be held in connection with the LSA Annual Meeting in Hong Kong — look out for the call for papers later this year.
The workshop combines plenary sessions with smaller breakout groups, allowing for both wide-ranging debate and close engagement with individual papers. It has become a key gathering point for the global LPE community — a place to develop new ideas, forge connections across disciplines and regions, and advance the collective intellectual project of the network.
Organizing Committee

Maj Grasten – University of Copenhagen Business School

Daniela Campos Ugaz – Emory University
Jay Varellas – UC Berkeley
Henrique Castro – University of Konstanz

Leanna Katz – McGill University

M. Francis Cao – Goethe University Frankfurt

Co-organizers and Sponsors

Law and Political Economy Collective

UC Berkeley School of Law

CRN 55 Law and Political Economy
2026-05-28 - 2026-05-31
CRN 55
Law and Political Economy
May 28-31, 2026,San Francisco, California

Programme

The Law and Political Economy CRN is a forum for legal scholars, social scientists,and others working at the intersection of law and political economy. It promotes interdisciplinary scholarship that brings political economy perspectives into legal and sociolegal research, and invites scholars from across sociology,political science, anthropology, geography, history, literature, gender studies, business studies, and heterodox economics to engage more deeply with legal rules, institutions, and processes. By centering political economy, the CRN explores how power and sociolegal structures shape behavior, governance,and institutional development. It supports work that foregrounds justice, fairness, identity, and sustainability, and welcomes scholarship that is comparative, historical, and transnational, as well as attentive to local legal systems and processes.

Organizing Committee

Maj Grasten – University of Copenhagen Business School

Daniela Campos Ugaz – Emory University
Jay Varellas – UC Berkeley
Henrique Castro – University of Konstanz

Leanna Katz – McGill University

M. Francis Cao – Goethe University Frankfurt

Co-organizers and Sponsors

Law and Political Economy Collective

Law and Society Association
