Hybrid Workshop - Exploring The Law and Political Economy Difference

[Baldy Center]

Event schedule and format subject to change, please check The Baldy Center event website for updates and registration: http://www.buffalo.edu/baldycenter/events/calendar.html

June 9 and 10, 2022: Join us for the workshop, Exploring The Law and Political Economy Difference. The multiple crises of the 21st century — covid, climate, financial instability, inequality, and rising authoritarianism – have spurred a new intellectual movement, Law and Political Economy (LPE). More than a set of policy preferences, LPE aims to re-frame basic assumptions, ideals, and methods of analysis to guide a better way forward for law, state, and economy. This workshop will bring together LPE scholars to flesh out how this emerging framework offers a new and different understanding of current problems and possibilities. LPE both consolidates decades of social justice-oriented legal theory and develops it further to address new challenges.

The workshop is organized by Martha T. McCluskey, in collaboration with the Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and Law (APPEAL).

New directions for thought and action

LPE is gaining recognition as an approach concerned with inequality, democracy, and the role of economic power. We will go beyond this general understanding to clarify how LPE addresses these themes differently than established traditions. LPE engages law with an economics not bound to the neoclassical orthodoxy, drawing on existing varied traditions of “political economy” and taking these further to highlight the centrality of law to economic power. We will further explore how this political economy perspective puts legal theory and legal institutions in a different light, suggesting new directions for thought and action.

Workshop participants will discuss:

How would a Law and Political Economy framework apply to a specific legal or economic issue?
How does LPE change common understandings of contemporary problems and solutions?
What common ideas and methods identify LPE as an approach useful across a range of topics?
What debates does LPE open up or close down?
What criticisms, debates, and diverging views should LPE address?
What further research topics and questions would advance LPE work?
How can LPE’s scholarly insights be better translated into public policy, legal doctrine, and grassroots activism?


For more information about the workshop, contact the Law Political Economy Conference, law-baldy-lpe@buffalo.edu


Further details and workshop registration forthcoming.