Lpeblog.org Website Review

a look at what we’ve published – and get ready for more posts after the break! LPEBlog will be on break until the New Year. We will be back in 2019 with new and exciting content! Ask not for whom the First Amendment tolls: It tolls for you.  Or so I argue in an essay just published at the Columbia Law Review online.  It’s called “The Lochnerized First Amendment and the FDA: Toward a More Democratic Political Economy name of the First Amendment, are “freeing” us from regulatory approaches that have worked for decades to protect us from snake oil and inform us about the products we put in our bodies. How did we arrive here? And how might demo­cratic prerogatives retain control over the webs of commodity exchange upon which our lives depend?  The essay addresses these questions, trying along the way to model how law and political economy an*lysis can contribute to our understanding. The FDA is a key accomplishment of both the Progressive Era and the New Deal and perhaps the most muscular of all federal agencies. It regulates one-fifth of the consumer economy, and has enjoyed extraordinarily high levels of influence and public trust throughout its long history.  This popularity may have something to do with the fact that the FDA gained its powers through successive waves of democratic demand for its intervention when “free markets” proved deadly.  (If you don’t know the story of thalidomide, which left a trail of destruction around the world in the 1950s and 1960s, here is a vivid introduction neoliberals, who resent its extensive powers.  Industry lobbying and sustained criticism from Chicago-school types and have had an impact; legislative as*aults challenging.  Perhaps that is why industry—and industry funded groups—have invested in the use of the courts to What does that attack look like?  The cases are astonishing.  Some suggest that drug companies have a free speech right to market drugs for unproven uses.  These threaten the system that the FDA has used for decades to develop the evidence we need to understand whether