May 21 2026. Living Under Contract: An LPE Analysis of American Democracy with Amy Cohen.
Thursday 21 May 2026, 2pm
In person Melbourne Law School
Register Here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdYrJmd4d5_dhjGx2a0Xf3t0yO3UrE3v6T83Fi3xNalRvfUnQ/viewform?usp=publish-editor
Living Under Contract: An LPE Analysis of American Democracy
Amy Cohen
Is President Donald Trump appealing in part because he has made contracts seem like provisional arrangements likely to endure only insofar as they serve his (or putatively national) interests? Two political economy studies of U.S. workplaces and firms, one ethnographic and one historical, can begin to shed light. Ilana Gershon’s ethnography explores how people’s everyday legal and political consciousness is formed through their experiences of regulatory decision-making in a contract-filled workplace. Sociologist Melinda Cooper’s historical account reveals how a turn to viewing corporations as a conglomeration of individual contracts paved the way for a veneration of autocratic rule. In making this argument, this paper illustrates how people’s legal and political sensibilities are often shaped by their experiences in economic life. It also illustrates how qualitative and ethnographic research methods are particularly useful in moments such as the political present in the United States when what can be assumed about political, legal, and class identities and categories is rapidly changing.
Amy J. Cohen is the inaugural holder of the Robert J. Reinstein Chair in law. Amy’s research focuses on two areas of sociolegal scholarship—alternative dispute resolution and informal justice, including among people building alternatives to the criminal legal system, and law and economic development, including the law and political economy of agriculture and food. Before joining Temple, she was the John C. Elam/Vorys Sater Professor of Law at The Ohio State University and Professor of Law at UNSW Sydney in the School of Law, Society, and Criminology, where she remains an honorary professor. She has held visiting professorships at Harvard Law School, Osgoode Hall Law School, the University of Turin Faculty of Law, and the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences. She has also held fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the American Institute of Indian Studies at the University of Chicago, the Fulbright Program, the Collegio Carlo Alberto in Italy, and the University of Bayreuth Akexabder Von Humboldt Centre of Excellence in Germany. She used several of these fellowships to develop a multi-year project on smallholder farmers and economic justice in India.
