Programme

Friday, 3 Dec, 2021

Session 1: LPE in European legal thought: Past and present trajectories (13-15h CET)

Session 2: Economic rationalities in law: Situating LPE and L&E (15.30-18.10h CET)

Saturday, 4 December 2021

Session 3: Making Markets within and beyond the State (10.30-12.30h CET)

‘Lunchtime Dialogue: L&E vs LPE?’ (13.30-14.30 CET)

• Conversation on the general conference theme between Anna Chadwick (Glasgow) & Peter Cserne (Aberdeen)
• Moderator: Steven Medema (Duke)

Session 4:  LPE, the State, and Regulation (15:00-16:20 CET)

Event background

The renewed interest in connecting legal analysis to political economy has reinvigorated debates around economic thinking in law. In the U.S., ‘Law and Political Economy’ (LPE) is emerging as a scholarly project that highlights the constitutive role of law in the economy and that has become a sounding board for many broader political debates. While not a uniform field, LPE research translates to present economic realities the realist claim that legal entitlements determine the coercive power of market actors.

Initiated in the U.S., LPE approaches have captivated the interest of many European scholars. This workshop seeks to contribute to this exploration of LPE perspectives in Europe through a distinct angle, that is its relation to scholarship in Law & Economics. In the U.S. context, LPE is portrayed as a direct reaction to the mark that Law & Economics has left on legal thinking, legal education, and political practice over the past decades. The move beyond the “20th-century synthesis”, as suggested in a central contribution to the U.S. debate on LPE openly questions the normative focus on economic efficiency and the alleged sidelining of distributive issues under a mainstream Law & Economics lens.

We are interested in the dialectic between these two approaches to economic concepts in legal thought, in particular in terms of how they play out the European context. We believe that the burgeoning interest in LPE creates an opportunity to take stock of the state of Law & Economics in European scholarship and to investigate whether LPE ought to be understood as an immediate reaction to L&E in Europe, as it is by many constituencies in the U.S. What are commonalities and differences at the level of methodological and philosophical underpinnings between LPE and L&E? Does the context of European intellectual history in both legal and social thought give LPE and L&E a different orientation than in the U.S.? How different are the markets and political economies that LPE and L&E scholars are studying in Europe as compared with those in the U.S.? What are the stakes of studying markets at the local, national, regional, international or, indeed, global levels?

Although we are particularly interested in comparing developments in Europe with developments in the U.S., contributions are by no means restricted to European debates. We are also keen to invite contributions from people working on L&E and LPE in other parts of the world, and we also welcome critical engagement on the topic of the possible hegemony of European and U.S.-centric approaches to L&E and LPE.

Registration

Registration runs through Eventbrite. It free via the link below. Registered participants will receive the Zoom link on the day of the workshop.

About the organizers

This is the 12^th yearly event organized by MetaLawEcon, an international research network on the philosophical and methodological foundations of economic analysis of law.

This year’s workshop is hosted jointly with ‘Law and Political Economy in Europe’, an emerging informal network of scholars interested in understanding and promoting the role of political economy for legal thought in Europe and beyond. A core initiative is the development of an open, collaborative syllabus that can be found here. 

It is supported by the Amsterdam Center of Transformative Private Law (ACT), Erasmus School of Law, “Public and Private Interests: A New Balance”, University of Aberdeen Centre for Commercial Law.

The organizing committee (in alphabetical order) consists of Anna Chadwick (U Glasgow), Péter Cserne (U Aberdeen), Klaas Eller (U Amsterdam), Fabrizio Esposito (U Lisbon), Ioannis Kampourakis (U Rotterdam) and Felipe Figueroa Zimmermann (U Warwick).