Applying the Lens of Law and Political Economy to Rural America
Reflection by Annie Eisenberg.
Ann Eisenberg (South Carolina School of Law) shared her talk, Law and Political Economy in Rural America, with the Rural Reconciliation Project on October 8, 2021, as part of our series on Rural Infrastructure (video here and event summary here).
In this Reflection, Professor Eisenberg shares a bit more—in her own words—about how she sees the Law and Political Economy lens informing future Law and Rurality questions. Like all Commentary here on the Rural Review, this post expresses the personal opinions of the author.
For decades now, thinking borne of the law and economics movement has permeated legal thought and dictated its priorities. Those priorities have included maximizing market efficiency, keeping public costs low, and embracing public-private partnerships and entrepreneurialism as avenues to service provision and economic development. Markets are often characterized as forces of nature, the unnecessary disturbance of which violates some fundamental principle of a well-functioning society.
The counter-framework of law and political economy (LPE) has gained traction in recent years as an alternative way of thinking. Building on predecessors and parallel schools of thought, such as the critical legal studies movements, LPE offers the tools and the permission to emphasize competing, arguably more fundamental priorities: racial and economic justice, fairness, dignity, democracy, and the public interest. LPE is premised on the idea that law, politics, economics, and power dynamics are all fundamentally interconnected, rather than discrete spheres functioning independently.
The LPE lens is particularly salient for questions facing rural communities. Rural communities are, we are often told, the ultimate victims of well-functioning markets that know innately to direct resources and opportunities to denser urban centers that provide more returns per capita on investments. But the LPE lens reveals the market-centric story of the rural, while not entirely baseless, as a red herring.
Human beings have made decisions, implemented through laws and institutions, that have disadvantaged rural communities on varying intersectional axes. It helps to name those choices because in revealing the human agency in shaping our collective fates, we can see that alternative decisions—and potential new decisions to better address geographic inequality—remain within our control. Some examples of decisions that hurt rural communities and others include President Reagan’s and Congress’s decision to deregulate intercity bus service in 1982, President Clinton’s and Congress’s decision to approve the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement in 1993, a more recent Congress’s decision to exclude high-volume hydraulic fracturing from major environmental statutes, and many state legislatures’ decisions over the past several decades to pass so-called right-to-farm laws shielding agribusiness from nuisance lawsuits.
These decisions reveal that transportation markets, energy markets, trade markets, and agricultural markets are creatures of law and policy. And while this emphasis on decisions’ consequences might sound like a blame game, this analytical process actually offers more hope than the discourse that often predominates. Laws and policies can be changed, and need to be changed radically, if crises of climate change, racial injustice, and economic and geographic inequality are to be addressed. Revealing markets for what they are—policy-driven manifestations of our collective values—helps reveal a path forward toward a more hopeful and equitable future.
Ample work remains to be done to unpack a generation’s worth of fetishizing the idea of free markets in scholarly and public narratives. My articles applying the LPE lens and similar frameworks to the modern rural condition are available here. The Law and Political Economy Project housed at Yale Law School offers a variety of helpful tools for those interested in pursuing research on these topics. And of course, so many of us in the rural legal studies community are grateful to the Rural Reconciliation Project for leading the conversation on many related, pressing questions, and providing helpful resources such as the Rural Review.
Continue the Conversation!
The Rural Reconciliation Project thanks Ann Eisenberg for this thoughtful reflection on law, political economies, power, and rural futures. We welcome similar contributions from a range of rural and non-rural voices here on The Rural Review and have posted submission guidelines here.
