Next Past & Present Reading Group Text

Adam David Morton | December 13, 2025

All the details on the next text selected by the Past & Present Reading Group, commencing in 2026.

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Labour law and the reign of neoliberal legality

Brett Heino | November 12, 2024

Eugene Schofield-Georgeson synthesises, amongst other things, a juridification of social relationships, the centrality of contract as a means of repatterning those relationships, a synergy between neoliberal economic theory and law, and an opportunistic legal indeterminacy that can justify most [...]

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Review: Ruth Dukes and Wolfgang Streeck, Democracy at Work

Brett Heino | October 31, 2023

Ruth Dukes and Wolfgang Streeck’s Democracy at Work: Contract, Status and Post-Industrial Justice is a welcome contribution to a new wave of thinking about industrial democracy, one that will hopefully help us reverse the historical trend and meaningfully implement industrial democratic [...]

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War, law, political economy: thinking through forms

Ntina Tzouvala | September 19, 2023

In the recent years, progressive lawyers have sought to bring considerations of class and political economy back to the centre of legal analysis. Coalescing around ClassCrits and, more recently, the Law and Political Economy movement, legal scholars have taken aim at the role of law in [...]

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Labour Law and Social Justice: New Beginnings

Brett Heino | January 18, 2018

The law oppresses us and tricks us, The wage slave system drains our blood; The rich are free from obligation, The laws the poor delude.

— The Internationale adaptation of Charles H. Kerr translation from the original.

As these lines from The Internationale so graphically [...]

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The Great Leveler: Capitalism and Competition in the Court of Law

Brett Heino | June 23, 2017

There are few components of a capitalist society that penetrate as deeply and pro-foundly into the lives of the people as law. Whole swathes of social life, ranging from the labour–capital relationship, the make-up of the family, the regulation of crime and the relationship of citizens to [...]

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Kean Birch, Contract, Contract Law, and their Implications for Neoliberalism as a Concept

Gareth Bryant | February 5, 2017

Kean Birch (York University, Canada)

Title: Contract, Contract Law, and their Implications for Neoliberalism as a Concept

Abstract: Contractual relations underpin markets, although different analytical perspectives define contracts in very different ways: e.g. economists define [...]

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The Great Leveler

Brett Christophers | February 22, 2016

In the last few years the heavyweights of Keynesian economics have rediscovered monopoly power and its alter ego, competition. Joseph Stiglitz has been talking about monopoly. So too has Paul Krugman. Noting that “we don’t talk much about monopoly power these days,” for instance, Krugman [...]

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