The LPE Project

Weekly Roundup: Feb 20 Victor Pickard on the American media polycrisis and Mariana Pargendler on Brazil’s forgotten legal innovation. Plus, a fellowship in constitutional law and history, a new report on workplace democracy...

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?

When Workers Pierce the Corporate Veil: Brazil’s Forgotten Innovation In the early 20th century, foreign companies operating in Brazil would extract profits while using thinly capitalized subsidiaries to directly employ their workers. When things went wrong…

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.

Whistling at the Edge of Law The whistle is sounding in Minneapolis. The question before the legal profession is whether we will hear it, amplify it, and act accordingly, or instead insist that the ground eroding beneath our feet...

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...

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...

Weekly Roundup: Feb 13 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 law…

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..."

Whistling at the Edge of Law The whistle is sounding in Minneapolis. The question before the legal profession is whether we will hear it, amplify it, and act accordingly, or instead insist that the ground eroding beneath our feet...

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."

Whistling at the Edge of Law The whistle is sounding in Minneapolis. The question before the legal profession is whether we will hear it, amplify it, and act accordingly, or instead insist that the ground eroding beneath our feet...

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...

What is the Point of Overtime Laws? When Congress eliminated taxes on overtime last summer, it framed the move as a win for workers. However, by encouraging people to spend more time on the job, the policy runs directly counter to the…

Today, Eamon Coburn argues that the recent “no tax on overtime” provision, by encouraging people to spend more time on the job, runs directly counter to the original purpose of overtime laws: to protect workers’ personal time and give them greater control over their lives.

"No taxes on overtime" might sound like a win for workers, but the underlying message is clear: the 40-hour workweek is no longer enough.

A real pro-worker policy would mean shorter hours, higher pay, and no mandatory overtime.

"advocates for no tax on overtime have continually traded on the idea that the 40-hour workweek is no longer enough... But the idea that Americans are working too little is absurd. The average American worker spends over 1,800 hrs/yr on the job, dramatically more than workers in many economic peers"

What is the Point of Overtime Laws? When Congress eliminated taxes on overtime last summer, it framed the move as a win for workers. However, by encouraging people to spend more time on the job, the policy runs directly counter to the…

Great piece on the rationale for maximum hours laws in light of the “no tax on overtime” messaging in @lpeblog.bsky.social by Eamon Coburn : lpeproject.org/blog/what-is... .

Time to reclaim “8 (or 10 or 12) hours for what we will” as a principle in bargaining and lawmaking.

In 2015, Martin Shkreli became the most hated man in America by raising the price of Daraprim – an antiparasitic essential for immunocompromised patients – from $17.50 to $750 per pill.

How much does Daraprim cost today? $750 per pill.

I almost cried during the Bad Bunny show when I saw the workers repairing the electrical system. I spent years working on Puerto Rico's crisis, and this was the one thing I couldn't resolve before moving to the academy. Thanks to the @lpeblog.bsky.social and @lpeproject.bsky.social for sharing this.

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...

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

Almost 500 people in attendance at inaugural @a-lpe.bsky.social conference!

Cc @lpeproject.bsky.social @lpeblog.bsky.social

Deloitte is a $74B cancer on American government is an accurate diagnosis, but MAGA is constitutionally incapable of solving this problem.

Government inefficiency, privatization, and grift *is* their political project.

Depressing: we published a more informative post on the same topic last week, by an author who isn't a Nazi, and all we got was this lousy t-shirt.

"As one dissenting staffer reportedly said in response to the Heritage Foundation’s call for a 'Manhattan Project to restore the nuclear family': 'I don’t want to go back fifty years.'"

Our history "provides stark reminders of what a return to this vision of family could entail in practice: women trapped in abusive marriages; fines, incarceration, and family separation for poor women who had nonmarital children; unchecked discrimination in housing, employment, and child custody."

Writing a History of Marital Privilege in an Age of Retrenchment As the government seeks to erase the past injustices and achievements of marginalized groups, it is worth recalling how those gains were made. Parents, partners, students, and lawyers pursued a more…

Over at @lpeblog.bsky.social: My brilliant colleague @serenamayeri.bsky.social on "Writing a History of Marital Privilege in an Age of Retrenchment." #LegalHistory

ICYMI: Big Pharma avoids taxes the old-fashioned way—by threatening to ghost the country. Patrick Driessen explains.