Who We Are

Since 2014, APPEAL has organized scholarly activities and educational programs encouraging new (and renewed) approaches to interrelated problems of law, economy, and politics.

We are a collaborative community of researchers and learners in the U.S. and other countries interested in the role of legal, financial, and economic institutions in shaping power globally as well as in national and local contexts. APPEAL encourages critique of economic methods and theories along with policy work toward better alternatives. We share a belief that political economic systems should be more equal, humane, ecologically sustainable, and democratic.

New & Noteworthy

What is Capitalism? Reading & Discussion Group

Friday Sept. 27, 2024 at 3 pm EST (UTC-5) / 2pm Central US/ noon Pacific US/ 20:00 (8pm) UK time

All are welcome to join us for our informal online discussions!

REGISTER HERE

Zoom link and readings will be emailed

Join us Friday Sept. 27, 2024 at 3pm Eastern Time (UTC-5), for a discussion with Frank Pasquale of his recent article The New Antitrust, co-authored with Michael L. Cederblom and published at 33 U.S.C. Interdisciplinary L.J. 235 (2023).

In keeping with our standard format, please read the article in advance. We’ll keep the presentation to 10 minutes, followed by an hour of conversation with participants. The article is available for downloading at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4844006

This article reflects on the recent rethinking of US antitrust law among scholars and in the Biden administration’s public policy on competition law. This new antitrust approach both draws on and contributes to the Law and Political Economy intellectual movement. Displacing Establishment Antitrust, which has relied on a narrow economic theory of “consumer welfare,” the New Antitrust uses an interdisciplinary methodology to focus on questions of power, fairness, and inequality. In response to criticisms that the New Antitrust is driven by populist politics rather than proper expert analysis, the article traces the strong intellectual foundations of the approach. It highlights the ongoing value of robust antitrust enforcement in resisting the growing concentration of corporate power and interrelated barriers to racial equality and workers’ economic and social well-being.

Frank Pasquale, a co-founder and former Board member of APPEAL, is Professor of Law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School. He is an expert on the law of artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms, and machine learning. His books include The Black Box Society (Harvard University Press, 2015) and New Laws of Robotics (Harvard University Press, 2020). He has published more than 70 journal articles and book chapters, and co-edited The Oxford Handbook on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Transparent Data Mining for Big and Small Data (Springer-Verlag, 2017) (bio from Cornell faculty web page).

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NYC Workshop

Heterodox Economics Meets Law and Political Economy:

Examining Liberal Authoritarianism

Saturday October 19, 2024

9:00am – 5:30 pm ET

John Jay College

524 W 59th St New York, NY 10019 United States

We seek to feature multi-disciplinary and intersectional emerging scholarship that teases out the complex relationships between politics, law, and economic systems. We welcome papers both on and beyond the general workshop theme of Liberal Authoritarianism.

Students and emerging scholars interested in presenting LPE informed analysis of foreign policy, imperialism, or more broadly on the role of governance and regulation should submit a 100 – 350 word abstract with titles by October 1^st via this link

We encourage proposals and projects at every stage of their development; completed papers not necessary at time of workshop. If you are unsure if your proposal fits submission guidelines, please do not hesitate to contact appeal@politicaleconomylaw.org.

Just Published!

Martha T. McCluskey, "Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and the Law (APPEAL): Transforming Law and Economy," Journal of Law and Political Economy, volume 4, issue 1 (2023)

This article reflects on the Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and Law (APPEAL), formed in 2012 as the first contemporary scholarly group named for the emerging field of Law and Political Economy (LPE).

2023-2024 APPEAL FELLOWS

Meet our first APPEAL Fellows for 2023-2024! Awarded to two emerging scholars, the APPEAL fellows will provide supplemental conference support and mentoring to encourage new leaders in law and political economy.

Zac Hale

Zac is Senior Staff Attorney and Group Representation Specialist at Brooklyn Legal Services Corporation A (BKA), where he organizes with and advocates for groups of tenants fighting for housing justice. He is also a graduate student in economics department at CUNY’s John Jay College, where he supports movement-informed academic work as President of the John Jay Law and Political Economy Society. Zac also advocates for tenant-centered policy reform as Co-Chair of the Brooklyn Tenant Lawyers Network . He collaborated with APPEAL to organize workshops in 2022 and 2023 that highlighted critical scholarship in both law and economics. He is also a nominee for the APPEAL Board.

Reshard Kolabhai

Reshard is currently an LLM student at Yale Law School, and a former full time lecturer in Constitutional Law at North-West University in South Africa. He is researching structural economic inequality under the post-apartheid South African Constitution, focusing especially on socio-economic rights, democracy, and political economy. His experience includes coordinating a grassroots civil society response to Covid-19 in South Africa and extensive involvement in the arts. He is enthusiastic about teaching the change-makers of tomorrow.

APPEAL Emerging Scholar Steering Committee

We are also excited to announce our new committee of new and aspiring scholars! The group will provide opportunities for informal advice for building the law and political economy field, especially offering perspectives of students and recent graduates with interest in integrating heterodox and interdisciplinary approaches to economics with an understanding of law grounded in legal realist and critical theories.

Committee members:

Emily Pisano (John Jay Economics)

Alex Richwine (John Jay Economics)

Lily Ginsburg (Berkeley Law graduate)

Eleanor Morgan (Sarah Lawrence College graduate)

Zac Hale (John Jay Economics)

Oskar Dye-Furstenburg (John Jay Economics)

Lauren Johnson (New School Economics)

Leah Masci (New School Economics)