Symposia

People Must Live By Work: Direct Job Creation in America, from FDR to Reagan

Oct 19, 2018

Does Fintech Change Everything?

Jun 13, 2018 @ 6:00pm

This friendly roundtable debate explores the rise of cryptocurrency, blockchain, and related digital financial technologies, and their relationship to legal authority and state power. Co-sponsored by the New School Public and Urban Policy Doctoral Student Association.

Law and the Wealth of Nations: Finance, Prosperity, and Democracy

Jan 26, 2018

Tamara Lothian passed away in 2016, leaving behind two nearly finished books. The first of these works, Law and the Wealth of Nations: Finance, Prosperity, and Democracy, was published in 2017. On January 26, 2018, Duncan Kennedy, Mark Barenberg, Christine Desan, Robert Hockett, and Sanjay Reddy discussed Law and the Wealth of Nations, their friendship with Tamara, and what we…

MMT in the Streets–Grassroots Organizing and Mass Mobilization

Sep 24, 2017

This panel explores strategies and tactics for the popularization of MMT ideas, as well as the broader challenges and possibilities of grassroots organizing and messaging around macroeconomic issues.

Modern Money, Property Rights, and the Commons

Sep 24, 2017

This panel explores the relationship between modern money and the legal design of public and private ownership regimes regarding real estate, intellectual property, and the workplace/means of production.

Modern Money, Payment Systems, and Digital Rights

Sep 23, 2017

This panel explores the legal and technological dimensions of contemporary payments systems, including the relationship between monetary law and federal budget policy, the role of safe assets in financial market design, and the implications of digital payments technology for macroeconomic regulation and the preservation of individual freedom.

Modern Money, Financial Regulation, and Corporate Power

Sep 23, 2017

This panel explores the relationship between the Modern Money perspective and policy perspectives on corporate power, especially the power of financial institutions. How does understanding money recontextualize our understanding of corporate power? What approaches to regulating corporate power become more or less viable from a Modern Money perspective?

The Job Guarantee Design and Human Rights

Sep 22, 2017

This panel explores ways to concretize a “right to dignified work” in the context of a Job Guarantee program. Who selects the jobs? What are the eligibility and participation requirements? How can we design JG programs that address deeper social problems related to poverty and inequality?

Modern Money, Courts, and Civil Rights–Against Legal Predation

Sep 22, 2017

This panel explores the interplay between the cycle of crisis, austerity, privatization, and the concomitant loss of rights for the public. How do macroeconomic policy failures proliferate specific debtor-creditor relationships? What are the legal and social consequences of increasing taxes, interest rates, and civil and criminal penalties rather than spending public money for public purpose?

Towards a 21st Century Brain Trust – The Role of Lawyers in MMT

Sep 22, 2017

This panel explores the relationship between Modern Monetary Theory and legal theory, as well as the role of legal professionals in the MMT community, and lessons from prior law & economics movements for the development and operationalization of MMT ideas.

How The Other Half Banks: A Talk by Mehrsa Baradaran

Feb 23, 2017

In an age of corporate megabanks with trillions of dollars in assets, it is easy to forget that America’s banking system was originally created as a public service. Banks have always relied on credit from the federal government, provided on favorable terms so that they could issue low-interest loans. But as banks grew in size and political influence, they shed…

Financing Criminal Justice

Feb 17, 2017

Livestream video link here. In recent decades, state and local criminal justice systems across the country have become increasingly reliant on revenues generated through onerous fines and fees. Especially for poor, splintered municipalities that lack much of a permanent tax base, these monetary sanctions have been seen as an attractive alternative to progressive taxes on income and property. But governments’ increasing…