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

Yale Law Journal - Building a Law-and-Political-Economy Framework: Beyond the Twentieth-Century Synthesis
JEDEDIAH BRITTON - PURDY , DAVID SINGH GREWAL ,
AMY KAPCZYNSKI & K . SABEEL RAHMAN
Building a Law-and-Political-Economy Framework:  Beyond the Twentieth-Century Synthesis

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, neu-
trality, 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.***

from the Conclusion***Political fights interact generatively with scholarly and policy debates in
pointing the way toward a more democratic political economy. The emergence of new grassroots movements, campaigns, and proposals seeking to deepen our democracy is no guarantee of success. But their prevalence and influence make clear the dangers and opportunities of this moment of  upheaval—and highlight the stakes of building a new legal imaginary. Neoliberal political economy,
with its underlying commitments to efficiency, neutrality, and antipolitics, helped animate, shape, and legitimate a twentieth-century consensus that erased power, encased the market, and reinscribed racialized, economic, and gendered inequities. By contrast, a legal imaginary of democratic political economy, that takes seriously underlying concepts of power, equality, and democracy, can in-
form a wave of legal thought whose critique and policy imagination can amplify and accelerate these movements for structural reform—and, if we are lucky, help remake our polity in more deeply democratic ways.