Defining a just economy in a tenuous social-political time.
 
If we can agree that our current social-political moment is tenuous and unsustainable—and indeed, that may be the only thing we can agree on right now—then how do markets, governments, and people interact in this next era of the world? A Political Economy of Justice considers the strained state of our political economy in terms of where it can go from here. The contributors to this timely and essential volume look squarely at how normative and positive questions about political economy interact with each other—and from that beginning, how to chart a way forward to a just economy.
 
A Political Economy of Justice collects fourteen essays from prominent scholars across the social sciences, each writing in one of three lanes: the measures of a just political economy; the role of firms; and the roles of institutions and governments. The result is a wholly original and urgent new benchmark for the next stage of our democracy.

Over the course of his career at Harvard, Morton Horwitz changed the questions legal historians ask. The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (1977) disclosed the many ways that judge-made law favored commercial and property interests and remade law to promote economic growth. The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960 (1992) continued that project, with a focus on ideas that reshaped law as we struggled for objective and neutral legal responses to our country’s crises. In more recent years he has written extensively on the legal realists and the Warren Court.

Following an earlier festschrift volume by his former students, this volume includes essays by Horwitz’s colleagues at Harvard and those from across the academy, as well as his students. These essays assess specific themes in Horwitz’s work, from the antebellum era to the Warren Court, from jurisprudence to the influence of economics on judicial doctrine. The essays are, like Horwitz, provocative and original as they continue his transformation of American legal history.