Intensive Course: Law and Political Economy: Key Concepts

Note: The add/drop date for this course is Monday, January 4 at 10:00 PM.

Course Location: Please see the "Intensive Course Schedule" under Schedules and Timetables (http://www.law.utoronto.ca/academic-programs/schedules).

Note: Attendance at intensive courses is mandatory for the duration of the course.

What is “the economy”?  Is it separate from politics and law?  If it can be shaped by law, how ought it to be shaped?  And how might law and legal thought be implicated in the dramatic forms of inequality, concentrated power, degraded democracy, and climate and care crises we see around us today?  These questions have been central to the revival of interest in “law and political economy” in legal scholarship today.  This short course will introduce students to key concepts in this new literature. First, we will read scholars like Karl Polanyi, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and Nancy Fraser, who critique the idea of the self-regulating economy. Rather than study and seek to govern “the economy,” they suggest we analyze the social order of market society or capitalism.  This social order, they suggest, has not only dramatically transformed systems of production and social reproduction over many centuries, but also is prone to recurrent crises – providing us with a different way to see the present moment, and its opportunities and risks.  We’ll then read scholars developing specifically legal critiques of political economy.  

Given the short nature of the course, our emphasis will be on key concepts rather than proposals for reform. But we will end the course by discussing the implications of the legal critique of political economy for efforts to render our social order more democratic or genuinely free.