Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2020
Abstract
We live in a time of interrelated crises. Economic inequality and precarity, and crises of democracy, climate change, and more raise significant challenges for legal scholarship and thought. “Neoliberal” premises undergird many fields of law and have helped authorize policies and practices that reaffirm the inequities of the current era. In particular, market efficiency, neutrality, and formal equality have rendered key kinds of power invisible, and generated a skepticism of democratic politics. The result of these presumptions is what we call the “Twentieth-Century Synthesis”: a pervasive view of law that encases “the market” from claims of justice and conceals it from analyses of power.
This Feature offers a framework for identifying and critiquing the Twentieth-Century Synthesis. This is also a framework for a new “law-and-political-economy approach” to legal scholarship. We hope to help amplify and catalyze scholarship and pedagogy that place themes of power, equality, and democracy at the center of legal scholarship.
Disciplines
Banking and Finance Law | Education Law | Law | Law and Economics | Law and Society | Legal Education | Legal Profession
Recommended Citation
Jedediah S. Purdy, David S. Grewal, Amy Kapczynski & K. Sabeel Rahman,
Building a Law-and-Political-Economy Framework: Beyond the Twentieth-Century Synthesis,
129
Yale L. J.
1784
(2020).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/2856
Included in
Banking and Finance Law Commons, Education Law Commons, Law and Economics Commons, Law and Society Commons, Legal Education Commons, Legal Profession Commons