ClassCrits Workshop III:
Rethinking Economics and Law After the Great Recession

A conference cosponsored by the University at Buffalo Law School
and the Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy
Co-Organized by Angela Harris, Martha McCluskey and Athena Mutua
May 17-18, 2010

When: May 17-18, 2010
Where: University at Buffalo Law School (North Campus), 509 O'Brian Hall
Registration: BaldyRSVP@buffalo.edu

We are living in interesting times indeed. Richard Posner, father of the law and economics movement and tireless cheerleader for the propositions that common law distributions are always efficient and government regulation is usually for the worse, now admits in a new book that financial markets ought to be regulated. Who is at fault for his earlier misapprehension? Shockingly, Judge Posner points the finger at economists. Even economists themselves, normally a self-satisfied bunch, are experiencing a crisis of confidence as the human world experiences an unprecedented disturbance in the force. The Great Recession, many economists agree, has forced a rethinking of basic assumptions about markets and about economic analysis itself.

In this changed material and intellectual climate, what should become of law and economics? Will laissez-faire, rational man classic economic ideology and analysis rebound like the Dow? Or have the fundamentals changed? And what is the place of radical analysis of political economy in this time of upheaval? Is a critical law and economics or economics and law (more) thinkable?

The Rethinking Economics and Law After the Great Recession workshop will feature presentations and discussion of heterodox economic theory and its implications for law in the wake of the crisis within economic theory. Our goal is to engage with the rich scholarship of non-neoclassical economists, whose work is largely ignored in contemporary legal scholarship. Progressive economists will give an overview of their alternative perspectives on theory and policy. These discussions are meant to aid us in further developing a critical, interdisciplinary analysis of law and economic inequality.

Who are ClassCrits?

The "class-crits" are a group of progressive legal scholars who have met several times over the past five years to discuss market relations, political economy, labor, and patterns of production, consumption, and exchange and the ways in which these issues are related to structural subordination on the basis of race, class, gender, sexuality, and other "identities."

We believe that the Great Recession of 2008, combined with multiplying internal critiques, has left neoclassical economics in an intellectually precarious situation. Now may be a fruitful time for heterodox economists and progressive legal scholars to begin making alliances and mapping out new frameworks in which to talk about economic relations. We want to go beyond exegeses of the weaknesses of the neoclassical model and policy recommendations to the Obama Administration. Instead we are interested in new directions that take law and the State seriously, and that recognize the complexity of economic (market and non-market) institutions and practices in a caste society.

In addition to our intellectual agenda, we are mindful of the powerful influence that the first wave of "law and economics" has had on American (indeed global) scholarship and policymaking. We would love to spark a new, progressive law and economics movement that speaks to all the issues left out of the first wave of law and economics, and that would broaden both economics education and legal education as well as expanding the toolkit of the next generation of America’s lawmakers, activists, and policymakers.