Week in review: @veenadubal.bsky.social and @azizaahmed.bsky.social on how feminists transformed the law and science of AIDS, @lookheron.bsky.social on market governance in Trumpworld, and @abalasub.bsky.social on the misnomer of modern Indian capital.
Plus, the best of LPE from around the web 🧵
Today, @abalasub.bsky.social continues our symposium on *Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry.*
Given that Indian firms spend virtually nothing on R&D, he asks, how we should understand the modernity of so-called “modern Indian capitalists”?
screenshotted excerpt from the interview linked in the post the question, written in bold, is: "What did the CDC’s definition of AIDS look like at this point, and how did it systematically exclude women like the ones Terry was representing?" Screenshot includes the first two paragraphs of Aziza's answer, which starts as follows: At the time, the CDC defined AIDS through symptom lists tailored to the so-called “four Hs”: homosexuals, Haitians, heroin users, and hemophiliacs. Gynecological conditions were excluded. As a result, many women whose HIV had progressed to AIDS—often through invasive cervical cancer or recurrent pelvic inflammatory disease—were unable to work but did not qualify for benefits. Instead they would have to file for disability benefits. But the disability assessment process was so slow that some women were approved only after they had died. Terry realized the problem wasn’t just bureaucratic delay—it was the definition of the disease itself. At the same time, activists within ACT UP, particularly Maxine Wolfe and the Women’s Caucus, were recognizing that women were being systematically ignored in the epidemic. Terry’s legal advocacy and ACT UP’s activism converged in a coordinated push to force the CDC to revise its definition of AIDS.
this answer from @azizaahmed.bsky.social in an interview about her book, Risk and Resistance: How Feminists Transformed the Law and Science of AIDS, just blew my mind
lpeproject.org/blog/how-fem...
Today, Luke Herrine (@lookheron.bsky.social) offers a whirlwind tour of market governance in Trumpworld.
While most agencies have embraced a pro-monopolist, pro-corruption reorientation, the lone exception is the FTC. Why is this? And what does it suggest about market regulation under Trump 2.0?
a photo of Justice Powell from his time on the Supreme Court
Depending on who you ask, Lewis Powell Jr. is either: an ideological mastermind of the Right who led the corporate counter-revolution OR the Supreme Court’s quintessential “swing justice" upholding liberal positions in some of the Court’s most high-profile cases (from affirmative action to abortion)
I’ve got a spicy essay on @lpeblog.bsky.social arguing Trump2 so far has been like 1979 deregulation returning as farce
lpeproject.org/blog/market-...
Entry 8,735 in the ongoing series: “The Regrettable History of Law & Economics.”
Thank you to the most brilliant @veenadubal.bsky.social for being my conversation partner about my book on the @lpeblog.bsky.social and to the masterful @jamesbrandt.bsky.social for his support. lpeproject.org/blog/how-fem... @bulaw.bsky.social
The week in review: Sophina Clark on work-spreading as a non-reformist reform, @jasonbjackson.bsky.social on the moral orders of capitalist legitimacy, and Amy Cohen on a potential post-moral turn in American capitalism.
Plus, the best of LPE from around the web 🧵
Today, Amy Cohen continues our symposium on @jasonbjackson.bsky.social's *Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry,* considering what his framework might tell us about the recent return of patrimonial capitalism in the United States.
Really honored to have my new @harvardpress.bsky.social book be part of an @lpeblog.bsky.social symposium! I am deeply grateful to @lpeproject.bsky.social colleagues for the opportunity, and to my respondents @maggor.bsky.social, @abalasub.bsky.social & Amy Cohen for engaging with my work. 🙏
Today, @jasonbjackson.bsky.social kicks off a symposium on his new book, *Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry: How Capitalist Legitimacy Shaped Foreign Investment Policy in India.*
Economic policymaking, he argues, is best understood as a state-led project of moral ordering of capital.
"There are many ways to create work: through lowering interest rates to spur investment (Keynesians), industrial policy or jobs programs (New Dealers), tax breaks or deregulation (neoliberals)... these are reformist reforms. They perpetuate the work-based society rather than moving us beyond it."
Can we, the long-houred professionals, shorten our workweeks so that all might work? Can we accept that our work, so important to us, might, in an ideal world, not exist at all?
"There are many ways to create work: through lowering interest rates to spur investment (Keynesians), industrial policy or jobs programs (New Dealers), tax breaks or deregulation (neoliberals)... these are reformist reforms. They perpetuate the work-based society rather than moving us beyond it."
Week in review: Mariana Pargendler and Olívia Pasqualeto on Brazil’s forgotten legal innovation to protect workers, and Victor Pickard on the American media polycrisis.
Plus, as always, the best of LPE from around the web 🧵
Anyone have an answer for Laura?
Today, Mariana Pargendler explains how, in 1937, Brazil adopted a bold legal innovation to protect workers that remains virtually nonexistent in the Global North: imposing joint and several liability on parent companies for labor obligations.
This overlooked history "teaches us that limited liability is neither natural nor universal, that legal innovation doesn’t flow only from North to South, and that seemingly technical corporate law doctrines are deeply entangled with questions of distribution, power, and sovereignty." 🔥🔥
I don’t think most people realize just how little the United States has traditionally spent on public media.
whew this piece by a Minnesota law prof says the "destabilization" rn is "not the breakdown of legal protection, but the migration of those cracks inward [...] That migration from margin to center is visible not only on the street but in constitutional doctrine itself"
lpeproject.org/blog/whistli...
I have a new @lpeproject.bsky.social essay out that offers a framework for teasing apart three discrete and cascading layers of “media capture” that produce censorship, exclusion, and democratic failure in our information and communication systems. lpeproject.org/blog/the-ame...
The week in review: Vincent Joralemon on the flawed legal architecture behind drug pricing, Eamon Coburn on the anti-worker character of “no taxes on overtime,” and Emmanuel Mauleón on the gradual erosion of legal protection preceding recent events in Minnesota.
Plus, the best of LPE in the 🧵👇
A must-read: "If law is to function as anything other than a retrospective vocabulary for state violence, as a lens inverted to minimize and occlude the contours of such violence and its meanings, then it must be wielded deliberately..."
Today, Emmanuel Mauleón reflects on the situation in Minnesota, what it tells us about the law, and how the legal community should respond.
lpeproject.org/blog/whistli...
"The question, then, is not whether violence has intensified, but why it can now appear without disguise. Practices long concentrated at the border and in communities deemed expendable have traveled inward, meeting people who once believed law would shield them."
"Here, too, law and order are being produced, not by courts that rapidly retreat from confrontation under a presumption of regularity, or agencies that disclaim responsibility for their own violence, but by collective practice that emerges when formal guarantees prove selectively unreliable."
a beautifully written and powerful piece from University of Minnesota Law professor Emmanuel Mauleón on the stakes of how the legal profession responds in this moment.
lpeproject.org/blog/whistli...
We have whistles. They have guns. The asymmetry is real, and the danger is not rhetorical. But the history of state repression does not turn on weapons and violence alone. It turns on whether isolation succeeds and fear fragments those subjected to it, or whether coordination interrupts that process. A whistle cannot revive lives lost, but it can prevent disappearance. It generates witnesses, produces visibility, and transforms individual vulnerability into collective agency. It functions not as a substitute for law, but as a refusal to wait for law to secure what it has already failed to protect. This is not a call for refinement or recalibration of immigration enforcement following months of federal occupation in Minneapolis. It is a call to name failure plainly. When ICE's ordinary operations require protection from law rather than obedience to it, abolition is not a radical slogan but a natural conclusion.
Hey, read this. lpeproject.org/blog/whistli...
