Events:
What is Capitalism? Reading & Discussion Group
All are welcome!
Friday, November 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.
REGISTER HERE
For questions, contact appeal@politicaleconomylaw.org
We welcome suggestions for readings and presenters!
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APPEAL
Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and the Law
A Program of the LPE Collective
www.lpecollective.org
ANNOUNCING: CALL FOR EMERGING SCHOLAR SUBMISSIONS
Heterodox Economics Meets Law and Political Economy:
Reclaiming Democracy
Saturday, November 8, 2025
9:00am–5:00pm ET
John Jay College
524 W 59th St, New York, NY 10019
To attend (in-person only) REGISTER HERE.
At our Fall 2025 workshop, we seek to feature multi-disciplinary and intersectional emerging scholarship reflecting on the relationships between politics, law, economics, and society. On the heels of the New York mayoral election, this workshop will be organized around the theme of “Reclaiming Democracy”.
In addition to highlighting the work of students and emerging scholars, this workshop will feature a panel discussion on the methods of law and political economy and keynote lectures by Kimberly Kracman and Zephyr Teachout on the role of left movements in bringing about economic democracy in the past and present.
Kimberly Kracman is an Associate Research Scholar in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University. Kim’s research uses the methods of historical sociology and economic history, critical accounting theory, stratification economics and conflict economics to study the origins, mechanisms, and justification of the distribution of wealth in the United States in the context of global systems of capital accumulation.
Zephyr Teachout is Zephyr Teachout is a Professor at Law at Fordham Law School where she focuses on the intersection of corporate power and political power. Her most recent book, Break 'em Up (2020), makes a case for reimagining the relationship between democracy and antimonopoly law.
If you are interested in presenting or attending, please note that, while the workshop and conference are free of charge and will include lunch and refreshments, we are unfortunately unable to provide support for travel or lodging.
Co-organizers and Sponsors:
The Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and the Law (APPEAL), a program of the LPE Collective;
John Jay College Economics Department;
John Jay College Law and Political Economy Society; and
UMass Amherst LPE Group