Jeremy Bearer-Friend (George Washington), Bridget J. Crawford (Pace), Tessa Davis (South Carolina), Anthony C. Infanti (Pittsburgh), Ariel Jurow Kleiman (Southern California), Goldburn Maynard Jr. (Connecticut), Blaine G. Saito (Ohio State), and Clint Wallace (South Carolina) have a new piece forthcoming in the Ohio State Law Journal Online, “Critical Tax Meets Law and Political Economy: A Conversation.” Here’s the abstract:

This Essay grew out of a roundtable conversation at the Inaugural Conference of the Association of Law and Political Economy held in Richmond, Virginia, in February 2026. The participants in that roundtable were law professors engaged in scholarship examining how tax law shapes inequality and the distribution of power. They identify as critical tax scholars, LPE scholars, or neither. Written in dialogue form, the Essay explores the intellectual relationship between critical tax theory and the law and political economy (LPE) movement. The focus is on the two traditions’ shared commitments to examining hierarchy, democratic accountability, and institutional design, as well as their differing methodological and normative orientations.

Written in dialogue form, this Essay makes three principal contributions: historiographical, analytical, and suggestive. First, it explores how critical tax theory anticipated many of the LPE movement’s central concerns by demonstrating how ostensibly neutral tax rules reinforce hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, class, and citizenship. Second, the authors consider areas of convergence and tension between the two frameworks, including debates over efficiency, redistribution, class analysis, and the relationship between technocratic tax design and democratic legitimacy. Third, this Essay considers how engagement between and among critical tax and LPE scholars may expand the scope of inquiry, encouraging greater attention to labor markets, family structure, administrative design, and the political uses of complexity. By bringing critical tax theory and LPE into direct conversation, this Essay underscores the importance of tax scholarship in illuminating how legal and fiscal systems shape economic life and democratic governance.