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.

Since 2024, APPEAL has been part of the LPE Collective, a collaboration of membership organizations advancing LPE scholarship and community building.

Events:

What is Capitalism? Reading & Discussion Group

All are welcome!

Next Session:

Friday, April 10, 2026 at 3 pm EDT (UTC-4)- Join us for a discussion with Jason Jackson featuring his new book, Trader, Speculators, and Captains of Industry: How Capitalist Legitimacy Shaped Foreign Investment Policy in India (Harvard University Press 2025).

REGISTER HERE

Jason Jackson is Associate Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Drawing on the author’s extensive field research, the book explores India’s two contrasting policy approaches to economic governance in recent decades, one favoring “traditional” trade and one favoring “modern” business practices. Jackson analyzes these as dual “moral categories of capitalist legitimacy” that shape elite judgments about the nationalist effects of firms’ economic behavior. Do Indian entrepreneurs and business practices deserve state support to protect India’s economy and society against extraction by multinational corporations? Or does India’s economic development instead depend on neoliberal state support for foreign investment bringing new technology and competitive practices in place of self-serving insular “traders” ?

We’ll begin with a 10 minute introduction by the author, followed by extended conversation with participants.

For questions, contact appeal@politicaleconomylaw.org. We welcome suggestions for readings and presenters!

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RESOURCES:

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)