Mehrsa Baradaran

Digging a Hole: The Legal Theory Podcast

We’re almost at the end of our season, just as the biggest sports leagues in the world come to the end of theirs (as our guest today says, it all revolves around oil, and maybe a bit of corruption and looting). Speaking of today’s guest, we’ve got on an expert in banking and the racial wealth gap whose biography will probably surprise you at every turn: Mehrsa Baradaran, Professor of Law at the University of California Irvine School of Law, who takes us on a tour of her new book The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America.

Even though Sam and David’s respective views on neoliberalism are what makes this a podcast divided, Baradaran opens the podcast by telling us that neoliberalism is synonymous with corruption and looting, but also that she’s a big fan of markets. Next, Baradaran gives us a brief and maybe controversial account of the post-World War Two era, placing empire and race, not economics or ideology, at the center. Sam presses Baradaran on her thesis: that conmen and grifters, big oil and big tobacco, used neoliberalism, which then gained a life of its own as law and economics. David valiantly defends law and economics (sadly, no one seems to be convinced). We end with exposing the quietest coup: maybe Baradaran, in aiming to bare everything wrong with our economic system, was the real neoliberal all along.

This podcast is generously supported by Themis Bar Review.

Referenced Readings

• The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon

• The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap by Mehrsa Baradaran

• Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism by Paul Sabin

• The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties by Daniel Bell

• The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

• Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields

• “Protestors Criticized For Looting Businesses Without Forming Private Equity Firm First” in The Onion