This review of Grundmann, Micklitz and Renner’s New Private Law Theory begins by noting its historical perspective, and the fruitfulness of setting alongside each other seminal writings of European jurists from the early twentieth century with the contributions of American law and economics and critical legal scholars from the late twentieth and early twenty-first. A century ago, legal scholarship was addressing the “social question:” How to accommodate private law to the demands of a rising working class? Today, steepening inequality and polarization have brought the social question, and with it class politics, back into view. Using as a case study the mass sackings engineered by the shipping company P&O in March 2022, we can see that today’s private law is deeply implicated in the generation of structural disadvantage. A private law more concerned with extracting and hiding wealth than creating it might be thought to have a limited future.

This study examines how state government responses to economic crisis, in the form of unexpected changes in state fiscal policy, influence income inequality. State governments are vital actors in times of fiscal stress as nearly every state must make difficult policy decisions related to taxes and spending to address budget deficits, both of which are policies that shape the income gap. Focusing on periods of fiscal stress is important for the study of state inequality as those with fewer resources are the most likely to experience the consequences of their state’s fiscal response during these times. Using time-series cross-sectional data, this research demonstrates that income inequality increases when states respond to economic crisis by relying on unexpected spending cuts. These effects tend to persist even after initial economic downturns. In addition, one individual-level implication of the aggregate relationship between state policy responses and inequality—that people will be worse off financially when their states emphasize budget cuts in response to economic decline—is assessed using several post–Great Recession surveys. The findings have implications for the future of inequality in the United States and provide potential paths for state fiscal reform.

While most Americans appear to acknowledge the large gap between the rich and the poor in the United States, it is not clear whether the public is aware of recent changes in income inequality. Even though economic inequality has grown substantially in recent decades, studies have shown that the public's perception of growing income disparities has remained mostly unchanged since the 1980s. This research offers an alternative approach to evaluating how public perceptions of inequality are developed. Centrally, it conceptualizes the public's response to growing economic disparities by applying theories of macro-political behavior and place-based contextual effects to the formation of aggregate perceptions about income inequality. It is argued that most of the public relies on basic information about the economy to form attitudes about inequality and that geographic context—in this case, the American states—plays a role in how views of income disparities are produced. A new measure of state perceptions of growing economic inequality over a 25-year period is used to examine whether the public is responsive to objective changes in economic inequality. Time-series cross-sectional analyses suggest that the public's perceptions of growing inequality are largely influenced by objective state economic indicators and state political ideology. This research has implications for how knowledgeable the public is of disparities between the rich and the poor, whether state context influences attitudes about inequality, and what role the public will have in determining how expanding income differences are addressed through government policy.

This article investigates how the Chinese labour law system has helped to reproduce capitalist hegemony, i.e. the ethico-political, moral and cultural leadership of the ruling class. Based on intensive fieldwork in the Pearl River Delta and 115 interviews with migrant workers, this article shows that the labour law system has exercised a double hegemonic effect with regards to capital–labour relations and state–labour relations. Through normalizing, countervailing, concealing and transmuting mechanisms, the labour law system has been able to buffer both the market economy and the party-state from workers’ radical and fundamental criticism. However, the double hegemony mediated through the labour law system has influenced the Chinese migrant workers in an uneven manner: some of them have granted active consent to the ruling class leadership; some have only rendered passive consent; and some have refused to give any consent at all.