Welcome to the companion website for the upcomingConstructing Countervailing Power: Law and Organizing in an Era of Political Inequality Accelerator Workshop. We are very excited for this event, taking place on Monday, December 4 – Tuesday, December 5, 2023, and we look forward to seeing everyone soon. Please feel free to explore this website. We will strive to make sure that the most up-to-date information is installed. Thank you.

Executive Summary

We propose to explore an innovative approach to remedying the crisis of economic and political inequality: using law to facilitate organizing by the poor and working class, not only as workers, but also as tenants, debtors, welfare beneficiaries, and others. Professors Sachs and Kate Andrias (Columbia Law School) framed this approach in their groundbreaking article in the Yale Law Journal, “Constructing Countervailing Power: Law and Organizing in an Era of Political Inequality.” The successes and failures of different social movements and labor law can show how law can supplement the regimes of campaign finance, voting rights and lobbying reform and enable lower-income groups to build organizations capable of countervailing the economic and political power of the wealthy. In our labor law reform project, Clean Slate for Worker Power, we developed recommendations for rewriting labor law in order to facilitate workers building a more just economy and democracy. In our Constructing Countervailing Power project, we want to explore whether we can use the same policy development methodology to craft recommendations for advancing a new vision of the law that governs other social movements. We are particularly interested in exploring whether it is possible to construct a legal infrastructure that could link the power of these other social movements to a reinvigorated labor movement to optimize the countervailing power of the poor and working class. We will engage government officials, organizers, and advocates in addition to academics of multiple disciplines in this exploration.

Workshop Organizers

Sharon Block, Professor of Practice, Harvard Law School

Benjamin Sachs, Kestnbaum Professor of Labor and Industry, Harvard Law School