Yale University

Legal scholarship and practice have been central to neoliberalism’s success as both a conceptual paradigm and a political and economic practice. While neoliberalism is most commonly associated with economics and the social sciences — particularly among thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman — it is through the co-option of legal scholarship, doctrine, and practice that neoliberal concepts have had their most far-reaching effects. Law and Political Economy (LPE), an emerging approach in legal scholarship and pedagogy, is the defining response to neoliberalism in the current legal academy. The scholars funded through this grant have been focused on advancing this approach. Their ambition is to develop LPE into a far-reaching shift that will change the way law is studied and taught, the public discussion of legal and political institutions and power, and law’s role in policymaking and political mobilization.

A multiyear effort to catalyze a new field of American Political Economy (APE) within political science, this project will be animated by the production and dissemination of — and outreach and community building around — a set of high-quality research contributions outlining the extraordinary promise of APE. In addition to reshaping our understanding of the American political economy, the project will promote a new generation of APE scholarship, with the potential to engage with and support policy-oriented research across multiple disciplines. The project will continue past the grant period with ongoing high-impact activities, including an annual training session, seed grants, and outreach to the media and policymakers.