How Big Law Makes Big Money | by Adam Tooze | The New York Review of Books

For fifty years the law and economics movement has had a huge influence on America s law schools. But today it faces a challenge from a new cohort of radical legal thinkers who gather under the banner of law and political economy. The About page of the Law and Political Economy blog, which arose out of a seminar led by Professor Amy Kapczynski at Yale Law School, declares, in what amounts to the cohort s manifesto:

Our blog begins from the observation that democratic political processes have lost control over fundamental decisions about how resources are allocated in our society. Legal doctrines enable champions of capital to subordinate democracy to the free market. We seek to develop a response by mapping how legal rules concentrate economic and political power amongst dominant social groups, and simultaneously build and expand modes of legal thinking which embed the economy in social life.

via www.nybooks.com

Well, *of course* democratic political processes are subordinated to property or as some insist on calling it, capital, in any right-thinking legal system. Otherwise, you’re just saying, you may have built that, but we took a vote and we decided we want it, but you have a nice day! That’s the problem with democracy. It’s so darn greedy.