Amy Kapczynski

this is a must read 🔥🔥

The People’s College

for a symposium on our free speech crisis, wrote a thing. knightcolumbia.org/blog/the-peo...

Happy to have this out - give it a read and let me know what you think

And in case any law reviews are looking for a great article, “Lewis Powell, Neoliberalism, and the Privatization of Public Law" is looking for a home

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)

if the ssrn link not working, here it is at the UCLR: lawreview.uchicago.edu/print-archiv...

Also some thoughts here on LPE and "method." Basically, I don't think we can do without either critical theory or social science - but LPE now leans toward the former and to more qualitative work bc that's how you build new paradigms. Welcome your thoughts!

This reparative work has two prominent strands. One aims at "power-building" - trying to counteract historical exclusion to enable more organized power, e.g. for tenants and workers. The second seeks to bring private power under more public authority, e.g. introducing public options.

tldr: (but read it, it's short!): LPE builds on realism (as law and econ did) but with a very different conception of how political economy *should* be governed. Instead of reliance on expert reconstruction via the economics of its time, LPE aims to answer this democratically and reparatively.

How does LPE relate to law and econ and legal realism? The University of Chicago L Rev. recently held a symposium on LPE and L&E, so I grabbed the chance to set out some ideas -> papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

going to keep saying: to keep functioning, a society must discourage baldfaced lying, especially by authorities

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

whether war, vaccines, or critical infrastructure there is contingent of the right that seems to believe that their security from the worst things that happen is some kind of metaphysical principle rather than the result of specific historical processes that could've gone otherwise and still could

a thing historians will marvel about when they study this era is the extent to which the "war is a thing that happens to poorer, browner people" class went about systematically dismantling every aspect of the global political order that confined the costs of war to poorer and browner people

Just going to say that decades of consumer welfare* analysis favoring media mergers made all of this possible, too

*it's rather about presuming consumer welfare from consolidation

in general (thanks @laminda.bsky.social)

go.bsky.app/2Fq4P6e

The DOJ's lawsuit against UCLA heavily recycles prior claims from a private lawsuit against UCLA (the Frankel case), a campus antisemitism report, and the federal government's own prior civil rights complaint against UCLA—lots of sources there.

So what, if anything, did DOJ learn or do differently?

Justice Department Sues University of California Over Antisemitism

Well, the DOJ has done it: they have filed a lawsuit against the University of California over antisemitism.

The complaint contains some falsehoods. But as someone who teaches and writes about Title VII, I'm equally struck by what the complaint doesn't say.

A few thoughts— 🧵

The American Media Polycrisis: Cascading Layers of Capture In countries facing democratic backsliding, attention often centers on state capture of the press. Recent U.S. media failures, however, demand a wider lens. Authoritarian encroachment here rests on…

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...

HUGE

Totally predictable also. yaledailynews.com/articles/kap...

Opinion | At the University of Minnesota, neutrality has become censorship "In theory, neutrality policies protect free debate by allowing the community to disagree on controversial matters. But in practice, these policies are easily weaponized to achieve the opposite — cens...

“Institutional neutrality” rules being used to censor campus speech in Minnesota. www.startribune.com/politics-uni...

Opinion | Universities are sending Trump a dangerous message Higher education is under attack. Drop the appeasement.

"Appeasement is being coordinated while resistance is not" is exactly right. (This op-ed from Arne Duncan and David Pressman is excellent; I hope university leaders will read it.) www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

No Kings includes Draft Kings

The first ALPE conference is in the books and it was incredible! Over 300 presenters, 450+ people in attendance. It was great to see so many friends and comrades who have been building LPE for years among so many new faces!

lawandpoliticaleconomy.org?page_id=63

How Bankruptcy Prioritizes Property Rights Over Public Good After a recent First Circuit decision, private creditors' bankruptcy rights pose an existential threat to the only electric utility in Puerto Rico. As this outcome shows, we need a new approach to…

If you were confused by the part of Bad Bunny’s halftime show where dancers re-enacted Puerto Rico’s economic struggles under PROMESA’s bankruptcy process, here’s a breakdown of what that moment was all about:

lpeproject.org/blog/how-ban...

excited to share that I am *officially running* to represent Massachusetts state employees on the MA public pension board!

I'm running because public pensions are *ours* and should serve the interests of state workers and our communities

I'm endorsed by @massteacher.bsky.social

www.mapension.com

Pardon my French, but the @a-lpe.bsky.social" 2026 conference was fucking awesome. Great to see old friends in person (including some for the first time). Meet new friends. And generate so much new thinking.

absolute ROCKSTARS.