Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and the Law (APPEAL)
A Program of the LPE Collective
www.lpecollective.org
Friday, Nov. 21, 2025 at 3 pm EST / 2pm Central US (20:00 GMT; UTC-5): Discussion with Jessica A. Shoemaker and James Fallows Tierney featuring their co-authored article, Trading Acres (forthcoming in Yale Law Journal 2025-26).
Excerpt from the co-authors' abstract:
Farmland's conversion into an asset class threatens rural livelihoods, agriculture and food system resilience, economic and spatial justice, and-in our final estimation-democracy itself.
. [H]istorically, investor-owned farmland was seen as a deep and politically motivating threat to rural life. In this Article, we argue that Wall Street's arrival at rural America's gate is not merely a market trend but rather the product of deep social choices governing the accumulation of investor wealth: property, corporate, and securities law. We explore the ways in which these deep structures of our legal system-from the primacy of market logics to a range of biases that skew our spatial, temporal, and social relations- constitute the conditions for this profound transformation in the way farmland, as a basic and essential rural resource, is being integrated
into the modern capital economy.
Jessica A. Shoemaker is Steinhart Foundation Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Nebraska College of Law.
James Fallows Tierney is Associate Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Chicago-Kent College of Law.
A draft of the article is available on SSRN here. Those registered will receive suggested sections of the article to focus on in their reading.
All are welcome to join us for these informal online discussions!
CLICK "NEXT" Below to REGISTER
Zoom & reading link will be emailed.
Please contact appeal@politicaleconomylaw.org if you have questions. We hope to see you (on zoom)!