Gender and Political Economy: Revisiting Distributive Analysis

This roundtable brings together a group of legal scholars whose projects concern gender and political economy. These speakers, drawing from critical legal thought (including American legal realist and post-realist traditions), sociological and historical analyses of social reproduction, critical race theory and racial capitalism, postcolonial history and theory, and feminism and queer theory, discuss methods for assessing legal rules and architectures as distributional mechanisms that affect social groups defined by gender, race, class, and sexuality. While liberal ideology imagines law as an external regulatory force, the coauthors understand law to constitute economies, families, corporations, and other institutions of governance. They discuss the utility of critical and genealogical methods to excavate law’s allocation of burdens and benefits to different social groups positioned in the market, the state, the global economy, and the family.