Democrat FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan has ties to a Marxist organization, the Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project, which supported the pro-Palestinian protesters involved in the encampment at Columbia University.
Khan, who is currently serving as the chairwoman for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), is also an associate professor of law at Columbia University who is currently on leave while serving in her present position and has been reported to have helped Amy Kapczynski, a faculty co-director with the LPE Project and a professor at Yale University, “design” her first LPE seminar.
In the Yale Law Report journal from the summer of 2023, Kapczynski spoke about the goals of the LPE movement:
Our goals are to develop new intellectual theories and approaches to understand our legal order and also to develop proposals that substantively can work in favor of more equality and democracy. There is a new peerreivewed Journal of Law and Political Economy, and LPE work is regularly being published in prominent law journals. We also now have major conferences and symposia dedicated to LPE ideas and LPE scholars in the administration in Washington – including Lina Khan ’17, who leads the Federal Trade Commission and who was part of the student group at Yale that helped me design my first LPE seminar. The interest in this work has been quite remarkable. It is pretty common now to hear that LPE is the next new school of legal thought.
Kapczynski has stated that she has “spent formative years studying political theory” along with other “forms of critical thought” such as from the “Frankfurt School, queer theory, post-colonial theory, psychoanalytic theory, and Marxist feminist thought,” according to the LPE Project website.
The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory is described as being an “assemblage of social scientists and researchers” who were interested in “the application” of Marxism, philosophy, and society.
An initial anti-Israel encampment was established at Columbia University on April 17, resulting in several students being suspended the next day and hundreds of protesters being arrested. While the university removed the encampment, another one was established in its place and remained until the New York Police Department (NYPD) conducted a raid on Tuesday after protesters seized control of Hamilton Hall, an academic building on campus.
Since then, anti-Israel protests and encampments have been popping up on college and university campuses in support of the original one started at Columbia University.
Kapczynski shared a post from the LPE Project in which current and former law school students from the Yale University Law School, the New York University (NYU) School of Law involved with LPE student groups, and student organizations such as the City University of New York (CUNY) Law Students Against Genocide and the Columbia Law Students for Palestine (CLSP) shared their thoughts on the anti-Israel protests and encampments.
“Everyone is talking about the student protests. But *stunning* how little we’ve heard from student organizers themselves,” Kapczynski wrote in a post on X, in which she shared a link to the LPE Project. “We asked some to explain their aims and concerns. If you read one thing about the protests today, read this.”
Everyone is talking about the student protests. But *stunning* how little we’ve heard from student organizers themselves. We asked some to explain their aims and concerns. If you read one thing about the protests today, read this: https://t.co/onwo5G30Fa pic.twitter.com/6hgvSRItYE
— Amy Kapczynski (@akapczynski) May 2, 2024
Corrine Blalock, who currently serves as the Executive Director of the LPE Project, also shared a link to the post on the organization’s website in a post on X, in which she noted that she “could not be happier” to have a group of students “involved with the encampments” at serveral universities.
“Genuinely could not be happier to have a group of incredible law students involved with the encampments at Columbia University, CUNY, Yale, and NYU talking about their experiences, their demands, and the LPE of it all on the blog today!” Blalock wrote:
Genuinely could not be happier to have a group of incredible law students involved with the encampments at Columbia, CUNY, Yale, and NYU talking abt their experiences, their demands, and the LPE of it all on the blog today! https://t.co/A06BUzrVIZ
— Corinne Blalock 🍉 (@corinneblalock) May 2, 2024
This is not the first time that Khan has been associated with the LPE Project. In July 2022, Khan and FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter spoke at an event that was hosted by the LPE Project.
During this event, the two spoke about “anti-racist antitrust” and how the FTC can “shape markets and economic outcomes.”
Most recently, during an event hosted by the LPE Project, Yale Law School LPE Student Group, American Constitution Society, Yale Law Democrats, the Yale Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy, and the Yale Information Society Project in March, Khan said it was an “honor to speak and praised Kapczynski:
First of all, let me just say, it’s such an honor to be here. I actually took antitrust law in this very classroom. I see the portrait of Robert Bork is still up there. I also took IP law with Professor Kapczynski and it’s a particular honor to get to have this conversation with her since she was such a source of inspiration and admiration, and of course such a key leader in the LPE movement. Khan said.
Breitbart News reached out to Khan for a statement but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
