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Law and Political Economy Collective

The Law and Political Economy Collective (LPE-C) is an academic membership organization that was formed in 2024 to promote the study of the relationship between law and economic power.

The Collective brings together a number of programs that represent over fifteen years of institution building in the law and political economy movement. These include ClassCrits, the Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and the Law (APPEAL), and the Global Law and Political Economy Network. Additionally, the peer-reviewed Journal of Law and Political Economy is a project of LPE-C.

LPE-C Programs

ClassCrits

ClassCrits is an academic organization that was founded in 2007 to explore the relationship between law and economic inequality. ClassCrits’ 2014 mission statement identified two central tenets informing its scholarship. The first was to investigate the way that class power was inextricably linked to racial and gender hierarchies, as well as to other forms of unequal power and privilege. The second was to theorize the way that law was central to the creation of maintenance of structural inequalities in the state and the market.

ClassCrits mission statement sets out the following objectives:

1. To foster discussion among scholars and activists on issues related to class and the intersection of class with race, gender, sexuality and other forms of structural subordination and inequality, including nationality, disability, and rurality

2. To provide collegial support for research and writing on class and the intersection of class with other forms of systemic subordination and inequality.

3. To serve as an organizing center for projects concerning law and class including, for example, casebooks, collaborative research projects, and other innovative, praxis-oriented projects.

4. In all of its work, encourage exploration of further questions about the above goals, including the meaning and usefulness of class as a category for addressing economic inequality and injustice; how to analyze and resist the various forms of systemic inequality that intersect with class and economics; and how we might expand or go beyond the concept of "equality" to advance economic justice, human flourishing, and ecological flourishing.

Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and the Law (APPEAL)

The Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and Law (APPEAL) was formed in 2012 as the first contemporary scholarly group named for the emerging field of Law and Political Economy. APPEAL emerged directly from connections made through ClassCrits, an early organizational leader of LPE for its emphasis on critical analysis of the interrelationships between economic power, class, race, gender, and other forms of systemic inequality.

In contrast to the tradition of neoclassical economics, APPEAL grounds political economy in social institutions, rather than individual behavior. From this perspective, APPEAL programs bring a range of social science and humanities perspectives to economic analysis, including legal realism, critical legal studies, heterodox economics, and economic sociology. Following the LPE approach developed by ClassCrits and further advanced by the Journal of Law and Political Economy, APPEAL affirms that contested ideas about identity, culture, subjectivity, and epistemology shape economic analysis and action.

Global LPE Network

The Global Law and Political Economy Network hosts the Law and Political Economy Collaborative Research Network of the Law and Society Association (CRN 55). The Network provides a forum for conversations between legal scholars, social scientists, and others at the intersection of law and political economy across the social sciences and humanities. The Network focuses on encouraging a broader range of approaches to political economy in legal and sociolegal scholarship with scholars from different disciplines.

The Journal of Law and Political Economy

The Journal of Law and Political Economy is a peer-reviewed academic journal promoting multi- and interdisciplinary analyses of the mutually constitutive interactions among law, society, institutions, and politics. The Journal is owned by ClassCrits Inc. and is hosted on the University of California’s open-access e-scholarship platform. The Journal publishes full-length articles, essays, and book reviews.

The Journal of Law and Political Economy’s central goal is to explore power in all of its manifestations (race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, global inequality, etc.) and the relationship of law to power. The intellectual foundations of the journal are informed broadly by the critical traditions in both law and political economy, which have challenged the assumptions, methods, omissions, and commitments of legal and economic thinking to emphasize the role of institutions, morality, politics, and social or historical context in shaping power relations. Background

Law and Political Economy is an interdisciplinary field that draws on insights from law, economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, and history to shed light on the way that law shapes, and is shaped by, economic processes. LPE scholarship reflects multiple traditions of thought, including classical political economy, legal realism, institutional economics, international political economy, critical race theory, critical legal studies, and Third World Approaches to International Law.

In their 2018 article, Law and Political Economy in a Time of Accelerating Crises, Angela Harris and Jay Varellas identify a series of issues that are central to the Law and Political Economy mission. These include financialization, worker precarity, new geographies of production, monopolization, digital surveillance and the algorithmic intermediation of life, neoliberal family policy, racialized state power, new authoritarianisms and ecological crises.