The Emerging Law and Political Economy Movement
In less than a decade, the Law and Political Economy Project (LPE) has become a significant force in legal academia and beyond. "Rooted in the insight that politics and the economy cannot be separated," the LPE move- ment now comprises student groups at Yale, Harvard, Berkeley and many other law schools; numerous symposia and conferences; and an online peer- reviewed journal, the Journal of Law and Political Economy. Crucial to LPE's mission is that it aims to refute and delegitimize, not build on and complement, the work of law and economics (L&E). Notwith- standing L&E's myriad successes, L&E is anathema to LPE. As four of LPE's co-founders explain in the Yale Law Journal article that is LPE's "ur-text," in their view L&E bears significant responsibility for creating a world of "rolling political, economic, social, and ecological crises." L&E's offenses, in their account, include "demanding that the satisfaction of mar- kets becomes the aim of politics," even while "it recognizes and embraces the fact that law makes markets," remaking antitrust law "to address a dras- tically narrowed conception of the problem of monopoly," and obscuring how "certain commitments in our law" embody or inculcate "certain kinds of political values." As a result, what is needed now, or so we are told, is a new and "different framework for legal thought" grounded in an "understanding that the economy is always already political in both its ori- gins and its consequences." To better understand LPE and its relationship with L&E, in April 2024 George Mason University's Law and Economics Center held a research roundtable and invited a group of distinguished scholars who are all highly conversant with L&E to participate as paper presenters and commentators. The articles in this issue of the Journal of Law, Economics and Policy are the product of these discussions. Taken together, the eight articles published here, along with a ninth presented at the research roundtable and slated to appear in the Boston College Law Review, demonstrate that L&E has a great deal to offer LPE and that LPE's relentless hostility toward L&E is unwarranted.