Against "Law and Political Economy"

I have a new paper out critiquing the "Law and Political Economy" Project. The Hewlett Foundation funds the project, based at the Yale Law School, as part of its nine-figure war on "neoliberalism."

As I describe in the paper,

LPE's website announces that the Project "brings together a network of scholars, practitioners, and students working to develop innovative intellectual, pedagogical, and political interventions to advance the study of political economy and law." The Project's goal is to cultivate "ideas and proposals to democratize our political economy and build a more just, equal, and sustainable future. The movement has its own journal, student groups at many elite law schools, and regular workshops and other events. It also boasts a network of several dozen law professors and a growing network of non-law professors who are affiliated with the Project. The LPE project is unusual because it has a clear founding text: Britton, Purdy, Grewal, Kapczynski, & Rahman's Building a Law-and-Political Economy Framework: Beyond the Twentieth-Century Synthesis.

My paper reviews this article, unfavorably:

Creating and implementing solutions to social problems requires a realistic assessment of the status quo. The authors of the Law and Political Economy Project movement's ur-text instead tilt at windmills. They believe that law professors have a tremendous influence on public policy, when our influence, though greater than the average citizen's, is insignificant relative to macro-trends in politics and society. They believe that the legal academy has been captured by Posnerians in private law and by neoliberals in constitutional law. In reaching this conclusion, they grossly exaggerate the influence of law and economics, misapprehend the focus of modern law and economics scholarship, and ignore the very strong leftward ideological leanings of public law scholars.

The authors believe that the American state has been "chastened" by neoliberalism, when it spends more and regulates more than ever. They think that economic policy is the font of inequality in America, while ignoring the changes in family dynamics that are the primary driver of multi-generational poverty and economic struggle. They blame public policy since the 1970s for oppressing women and non-white Americans, even though both groups are demonstrably better off today than they were fifty years ago. And their standard for a proper egalitarian democracy goes beyond the quixotic and into the impossible.

There may be a provocative, enlightening case to be made that the US needs to move its political and economic system closer to a left-progressive ideal. There may even be some reason to believe that an organized group of law professors interested in political economy is needed to move the US in that direction. But if either or both are true, the founders of the Law and Political Economy movement fail to demonstrate it.

That's just a summary of my conclusions. You can read the whole thing at the link provided.

Comments

[Ilya Snowman]

Great. So, they’re lying and have created a foil simply in order to legitimate their own presence and their sophomoric scholarship. Plus ca change…

It’s not enough to show that their claims are false. THEY DON’T CARE that their claims are false.

They are post-truth.

It’s of course perfectly reasonable for people to be mistaken, to earnestly subscribe to bad theories, etc. That’s not what these folks, and their crit-tarded cousins, are AT ALL.

The crits already led you down this path. It didn’t matter to them, or to their progeny, that their didn’t have coherent (internally consistent) methods or theories. It didn’t matter to them that their claims could be falsified empirically. It didn’t matter to them that the REAL critiques of ‘critique’ left them and their projects impotent, intellectually.

The stakes of not holding such folks accountable—and not merely by publishing articles exposing their claims as false, since they AND OTHERS won’t care—are high. It means the loss of American law faculties as places that belong in universities, as centres of genuine knowledge production or of credible expertise, etc.

The question becomes: HOW can you hold them, and others, accountable for this? How do you dissuade them, since merely exposing their lies won’t modify their behaviour? These are post-truth (knowledge/belief axis, hunger for episteme-dominance) ‘ideologues’ who aim only to grab and consolidate power. So, what OTHER FORMS of accountability might be warranted here?

Read the Guardian, as an example. Look at how it puts (American and other) Christian conservative academics under their thumb now, simply for not believing their dogmas. To put a spotlight on otherwise boring, unimportant, and wholly uninfluential academics in order to have the paper’s reading hordes ruin those peoples’ lives.

What can be done in turn here?

[robbbb]

Why raise the issue of how much money is being spent if you are trying to appear to engage in a debate over ideas? Do you mention how much funding the Heritage guys get when praising their concepts?

[Ilya Snowman]

Bernsteinbergsky showed you, at least in part, why and how it’s a PSEUDO-debate: the new cohort systematically lie in furtherance of a project of self-legitimisation and the delegitimisation of others.

If you consistently misrepresent the facts, including facts about what the other side(s) believe, said (in PRINT), and done, let alone the facts on the grounds about your society, then you’re neither interested in nor engaged in a real debate.

Evidence of such things is a good prima facie reason to both discount the literature and to distrust its authors. On the other hand, their works are useful data for any REAL research into the decline in (rape and murder of, really) core academic norms in American law schools/unis.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Bernstein, do you have any inkling that you have framed your comment as an assertion that ideological hyper-rationalism is better political practice than relying on experience guided by experiment, while relying on political accountability as the arbiter of results?