The Henry G. Manne Program in Law & Economics Studies, a division of the Law & Economics Center at George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School held a Research Roundtable on the Emerging Law & Political Economy Movement.
Housed at Yale Law School, a group of academics have organized to launch the Law & Political Economy Project (LPE Project). In many ways, its mission seems to be to directly challenge many of the conclusions generated from decades of research emerging from the field of law and economics. Broadly stated, traditional law and economics scholarship has generated research that supports the conclusions that abundance obtains by adherence to a paradigm that sets the conditions for human flourishing through following basic tenets of free markets, capitalism, the rule of law, individual freedom, equality of economic opportunity, and neutral resolution of disputes, enforcement of rights, and recognition of private ordering from an independent judiciary.
The new LPE Project seeks to attack that paradigm and propose an alternative that dismantles the core values that make markets thrive and abundance possible. An excerpt from its website demonstrates that the LPE Project seeks to promote scholarship that blames markets, capitalism, and liberal values for all that is wrong with society. As their website states: “We believe that developments over the last several decades in legal scholarship and policy helped to facilitate rising inequality and precarity, political alienation, the entrenchment of racial hierarchies and intersectional exploitation, and ecological and social catastrophe. We aim to help reverse these trends by supporting scholarly work that maps where we have gone wrong, and that develops ideas and proposals to democratize our political economy and build a more just, equal, and sustainable future.. . .Scholars in our network work to understand the relationship between market supremacy and racial, gender, and economic injustice; to articulate the relationship between capitalism and devaluation of social and ecological reproduction; and to explore the distinctive ways that law gives shape to and legitimates neoliberal capitalism, ranging from dynamics of financialization to the relation between the carceral state and capitalism. We also seek to offer concrete legal reforms designed to move beyond neoliberalism and toward a genuinely responsive, egalitarian democracy, with critical attention to the need for power and movement-building as part of any such transformation.” (italics added).
As a challenger to the Law & Economics paradigm, on what bases, if any, should the Law & Political Economy Project’s challenges themselves be challenged?
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The Manne Program at the Law & Economics Center issued a call for papers in order to produce insightful analysis exploring the premises, assumptions, foundations, research, and conclusions underlying the LPE Project and its stated goals.
Total honorarium payments of $12,000 per paper were available to the selected authors who fulfill all the obligations of the program, which are described in detail below.
- Submission of Research Proposal – Submission Deadline of January 22, 2024
- Research Roundtable, Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas (April 11-13, 2024):
- Completion of Final Draft, Submission to a Suitable Academic Journal, and Posting to SSRN (August 15, 2024):
- The LEC will also host these drafts on its website (https://masonlec.org).
In addition to providing honorarium, the LEC will provided lodging and meals at the Research Roundtable. Participants were responsible for their own transportation arrangements and expenses.
For questions about the Roundtable, please contact Angelica Sisson at asisson2@gmu.edu.
The Henry G. Manne Program in Law & Economics Studies seeks to improve the quality of legal scholarship by offering educational workshops on important and topical areas of study and funding faculty research, convening research roundtables, and hosting policy-relevant academic workshops and conferences.