Remaking Law & Economics: What is new about the Law and Political Economy Movement?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl.2295Keywords:
Law and Political Economy, Neoliberalism, Legal Realism, American Institutionalism, 20th century Synthesis, Intellectual HistoryAbstract
The Law and Political Economy (LPE) movement aims to challenge the dominance of the “Chicago approach” in Law and Economics and offer a political alternative to neoliberalism. To evaluate its prospects, we must clarify neoliberalism’s relationship to LPE’s intellectual lineage—Legal Realism and American Institutionalism—whose decline in U.S. academia coincided with the rise of the Chicago School and Public Choice Theory. These movements assimilated and redirected core insights of those earlier traditions. I argue that LPE must more fully reclaim its intellectual history to resist similar subversion. This is illustrated through the trajectory of a key idea shared by all of these traditions: that economic power is tantamount to political power. I conclude by proposing that this idea compels closer attention to what I call “modalities of power”—the mechanisms through which economic and political domination are intertwined.
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