All articles from Law and Political Economy

Public Money, Private Secrets: Rethinking FOIA in the Age of Public-Private Governance

As public-private partnerships become central to modern governance, FOIA’s Exemption 4 has evolved into a powerful tool for corporate secrecy. After Argus Leader, government agencies and private firms

What Can Politics Make of Nature?

Alyssa Battistoni’s Free Gifts argues that capitalism limits our freedom to decide how to value the nonhuman world. Politics, as the domain in which we choose the terms of our collective life, has a s

Weekly Roundup: Nov 21

Alyssa Battistoni on the free gifts of nature, Rob Hunter on value form theory and the accelerating climate crisis, and Reshard L. Kolabhai on what LPE can learn from the Global South. Plus, a CFP on

LPE Without Borders: Lessons from the Global South

Law and political economy scholarship, immersed in a particular history of Northern law and capitalism, has tended to focus on US law and policy, with occasional excursions into Europe. But in a world

When Nature is Worthless

Under capitalism, the social domination of nature occurs through and is mediated by the commodity form. Certain portions of non-human nature can be valued, but only when they are transformed into comm

In the Shadow of Commodification

While capitalism is typically said to commodify everything, much of what makes up our world isn’t commodified at all. It instead appears as a free gift: a social form that describes the condition of u