Building a Law-and-Political-Economy Framework: Beyond the Twentieth-Century Synthesis

Authors

Jedediah Britton-Purdy

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2020

Keywords

political economy, law and economics, constitutional law

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.

Citation

Jedediah Britton-Purdy, Building a Law-and-Political-Economy Framework: Beyond the Twentieth-Century Synthesis, 129 Yale Law Journal 1600-1945 (2020)