Law and Political Economy at the SLSA

‘Law and Political Economy’ (LPE) debuted as a ‘current topic’ at the 2024 Socio-Legal Studies Conference (SLSA) held in Portsmouth. Over the past few years, there has been a proliferation of platforms and venues devoted to analysing the role that law plays in creating and ordering economic phenomena. These include a widely-read blog, a vibrant European network, a new journal and book series, and an annual summer school. The SLSA Executive recently approved a permanent LPE stream going forward, which means that LPE scholars now have a dedicated space within the British Socio-Legal community to share their work and learn from each other.

LPE scholarship wants to lay bare how law constitutes economic relations and processes, and in turn, how these relations and processes impact upon law. Its ambition is nothing less than the re-politicisation of the role of law in society. LPE scholars regularly utilise existing conceptual tools from cognate fields such as economic sociology, political economy, and anthropology to analyse contemporary legal ordering. For example, LPE scholarship in the UK has drawn on institutional economics and economic sociology to help trace the relationships between law and economy. In other cases, it seeks to theorise the interaction of law and economy in sophisticated ways that lie beyond the purview of other disciplines. The focus of studies could range from those that challenge state/market distinctions, explore the influence of racial capitalism on markets, or provide conceptual analysis of the role of contract law in the economy. In this blog we reflect on the contribution of LPE to the field of Socio-Legal Studies in the UK and Europe.

The progenitor of the recent uptick in interest in questions of law and political economy were developments in the US. The proximate impetus for the launch of the LPE movement in the US was the Global Financial Crisis which dispelled any residual notion that financial markets—and markets more generally—operate in a neutral fashion according to well defined and predictable dynamics. The long-term goal of the US LPE movement is to disrupt the dominance of ‘law and economics’ in law schools, which prioritises efficiency over distributional concerns. The rise in interest in LPE methods and approaches in Britain responds to different pressures and concerns. On the research side, while Socio-Legal scholarship has a firm foothold in legal academia, a significant portion of the work fails to interrogate the contemporary state of our political economy. British LPE aims to fill this lacuna. On the education side, LPE seeks to challenge the continuing dominance of legal formalism in legal pedagogy (especially in the teaching of foundational courses) by introducing analytical frameworks and methods from other disciplines and challenging the conceptual divide between public and private law.

There is a long and storied tradition of Anglo-American legal scholarship that has sought to re-politicise the law and transform legal education. In the US, legal realism, critical legal studies, and critical race theory stand out as exemplary efforts in this regard. Similarly, legal scholars in Britain have historically drawn on a range of critical approaches to study the intersection of law and the economy. We include within this group the Fabian socialists who saw law as an instrument of progressive social change as well as Marxists who questioned whether the law could ever play such a role in a capitalist political economy. Tracing these historical lineages remind us that concerns about uncovering the role of politics in law are longstanding, as are desires to embed critical multi-disciplinary tools within legal education.

Inspired by these past efforts and motivated by the multiple and compounding crises in our political system, economic order, and natural environment, contemporary scholars working within the LPE tradition draw on a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to understand how law is implicated in the economy. While some see this diversity as hindering the development of a paradigm capable of challenging mainstream conceptualisations of the economy, we see the plurality of approaches as both inevitable and welcome. The fact that LPE is not captured by one school of thought aids rigorous Socio-Legal investigations. Disciplinary openness invites new ways of thinking about the function of law in society and avoids narrowing the assumptions that guide investigations into the causes of social phenomena and the extent to which law might transform social relations. While concepts and theory provide invaluable analytical tools, the diversity of law and regulation in contemporary societies, and its plurality of subfields, render impossible a broad consensus about theory.

At the 2024 SLSA, the LPE stream featured eighteen papers organised over six panels. The papers traversed a broad range of legal fields, including environmental, criminal, immigration, intellectual property, and labour law. A range of theoretical perspectives—ranging from Marxism and legal institutionalism to critical legal studies and TWAIL—and empirical approaches—ethnographic and a variety of other qualitative methods—were featured. Unsurprisingly, many of the papers were concerned with contemporary and historical developments in Britain and Europe, however, several of the papers had a distinctly international focus—for example one paper investigated informal work through an empirical study of silicosis victims in India and another on forms of reproductive labour such as surrogacy. One of the most engaging presentations was a summary of a forthcoming book on property and capitalism by one of the veterans of the British strand of critical legal studies, Paddy Ireland.

Please get in touch with one of the convenors below if you’re interested in presenting a paper or joining the LPE stream at the SLSA conference in Liverpool (15-17 April 2025). The call for papers closes on 18 December 2024 and must be submitted via Oxford Abstracts.

Manoj Dias-Abey (manoj.dias-abey@bristol.ac.uk) & Jack Meakin (j.meakin@leeds.ac.uk)