tle. “Starting something new at a law school, especially an elite law school, is really hard, especially when it’s something that goes against the grain of what people are typically taught and is not particularly well-funded by outside organizations,” said Sarang Shah, a former student editor of the blog who founded Berkeley’s LPE student group in 2019. Right-wing potshots, centrist co-option, or simply running out of steam (or money) are all real possibilities. “You know how you have rocks in a river, and if you’re right behind them you can avoid the power of the current? That’s kind of what LPE feels like,” added Conor Reynolds, who took part in the first LPE seminar and returned to Yale to teach environmental law after he graduated. What the movement does have in its favor is the nascent hunger of a younger generation to get a grip on the crisis-riven world it was born into, and to find the terms and the means to remake it. As Redburn put it, “We’re the children of the total failure of austerity politics. We’re the Occupiers and later the Black Lives Matter people, where our theory of change involves the wisdom of social movements and mass organization and not elite technocracy, which we’ve experienced as a total failure.” “What’s really happening is that you have a millennial and post-millennial generation that just doesn’t believe what their law professors tell them anymore,” said Sam Moyn, a law professor at Yale and contributor to the blog. “We’re talking about a limited number of people, but there’s a group of them in a lot of places
SEPTEMBER 2021
and it’s big enough to matter.” While the last decade of left social movement ferment has yielded no shortage of incisive critiques of the present order of things, the pressing question, according to Purdy, is “what is going to get built that lasts?”
has been profoundly constructive—we’re still living in the world it helped make. Much hinges on whether LPE will be able to make a new one.
“Critical work is just not nearly enough, and rejectionist stances have very limited scope,” he said. “Constructive vocabularies— which is not to say conciliatory or ‘nice’ vocabularies, but vocabularies which are worldmaking and institution-making—are really important.” In its own way, the law and economics vocabulary that LPE so stridently resists
Jack McCordick is a senior in Branford College.
POEM
MOT
BY AARON MAGLOIRE Death is a day trip. I drowned myself in the river and then got bored of it. One can only spend so long small talking with murk. My dreams, my firm works, my honey and bread. It is time to dine again. Enough fucking around. Watch now, as I emerge fully dry from the water that could not stomach me, my mouth ablaze with aphids and blue moths, my fresh deerskin dress. There is no myth here. Only the fact of my body warming as it walks forth into the clearing. Tell me again, the name of your god.
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