Many NELC Fellows just completed a major collaboration to produce a new book exploring the laws and policies supporting the shift to a new economy. Covering a variety of areas from food to energy to the commons and Earth rights, the book addresses the laws and values for undertaking comprehensive system change. NELC Fellows contributing to the book include NELC co-founders, Melissa Scanlan and Gus Speth, along with Shalanda Baker, David Bollier, Kevin Jones, Janelle Orsi, Laurie Ristino, Linda Sheehan, Jennifer Taub, and Mary Christina Wood. Additional authors joining the fellows are Jedediah Purdy, Mark James, Diana Winters, and Catherine Iorns Magallanes. NELC director, Melissa Scanlan, is the editor of the volume. To schedule a book talk, contact Becca Milaschewski, rmilaschewski@vermontlaw.edu

Law and Policy for a New Economy: Sustainable, Just, and Democratic, (Melissa K. Scanlan ed., Edward Elgar, 2017)

http://www.e-elgar.com/shop/law-and-policy-for-a-new-economy

E-book version available here: https://www.elgaronline.com/view/9781786434517.xml

In a new piece published in the sixth volume of Next System Project’s “New Systems: Possibilities and Proposals” series, NSP co-chair and New Economy Law Center co-founder Gus Speth presents the case for transforming our political economy, and offers a possible vision for an alternative system that prioritizes people, place, and planet over profit and power. “In the Joyful Economy, the goal of economic life is to sustain, nourish, and restore human and natural communities,” Speth writes. See the link below to read more.

http://www.thenextsystem.org/the-joyful-economy/

This essay is also an opening chapter in the forthcoming Law and Policy for a New Economy: Sustainable, Just, and Democratic, (Melissa K. Scanlan ed., Edward Elgar, forthcoming 2017)

http://www.e-elgar.com/shop/law-and-policy-for-a-new-economy

This Saturday, April 15^th – traditionally designated as “Tax Day,” – tens of thousands of people will take to the streets in cities across the globe in protest of President Donald Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns. The idea for a “Tax March” originated with Vermont Law School professor, and New Economy Law Center Fellow, Jennifer Taub. “I impulsively shot off a tweet at two in the afternoon, and by the next morning, I’d created a movement,” Taub told The Guardian. For the full story, see the link below.

Amber Jamieson. “Tax March: How a Law Professor Sparked a Global Event to Demand Trump’s Returns,” The Guardian, April 12, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/12/tax-march-trump-tax-returns-activism-jennifer-taub

Conventional neoclassical economics and traditional law curriculum are too confining and outdated to address contemporary challenges. This paper argues that “the urgent challenges of the 21^st Century also call for a new Law and Economics.” New Economy Law Center Fellows Martha McCluskey, Frank Pasquale, and Jennifer Taub authored the paper in response to Yale Law School’s Conference on Law and Inequality. The piece lays the foundation and outlines the aims of a new casebook by these Fellows.

Martha T. McCluskey, Frank Pasquale & Jennifer Taub, Law and Economics: Contemporary Approaches, 35 Yale L. & Pol’y Rev. 297 (2016), http://ylpr.yale.edu/sites/default/files/YLPR/mccusley-pasquale-taub.final_.2.pdf

Contributing authors – including New Economy Law Center Fellows Sarah Krakoff and Pat Parenteau – offer ideas for re-examining and re-evaluating the concept of sustainability within the complex context of anthropogenic climate change.

Jessica Owley and Keith Hirokawa (ed.) Rethinking Sustainability to Meet the Climate Change Challenge, Environmental Law Institute: Washington DC, 2015, https://www.eli.org/eli-press-books/rethinking-sustainability-meet-climate-change-challenge

“We urgently require an economic system that prioritizes ecological sustainability, just distribution and obligations to future generations…” (p.11), writes New Economy Law Center Fellow Joshua Farley in the introduction to a new book on ecological economics. In Beyond Uneconomic Growth, Farley provides an introductory synopsis on why a new economic system – inspired by Herman Daly’s ecological economic principles – is needed to avoid complete ecosystem collapse. Another New Economy Law Center Fellow, Peter G. Brown, concludes the volume with an ethical perspective that positions humans as participants in, rather than masters of, the larger ecological community.

Joshua Farley and Deepak Malghan (ed.) Beyond Uneconomic Growth: Economics, Equity and the Ecological Predicament, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016, http://www.e-elgar.com/shop/eep/preview/book/isbn/9781783472499/

Gus Speth, co-founder of the New Economy Law Center and co-chair of the Next System Project, announced a new edition in NSP’s “New Systems: Possibilities and Proposals” series. The four models highlighted in Volume Five of the series include the “Economy for the Common Good (ECG),” Paul Raskin’s vision of “Earthland,” Michael Shuman’s “The Promise of a Million Utopias,” and a vision for Community Economies. Economy for the Common Good founder Christian Felber visited the Vermont Law School campus last September to present his model in an event organized by NELC, part of Felber’s U.S. book tour. To read more about this tour and other ECG happenings, check out the newly launched International ECG Newsletter. To learn more about ECG and other political-economic alternatives, see the link below.

“New System Series: Volume Five,” Next System Project, February 28, 2017