Introducing the Lawyers Unrigging the Economy

The People’s Parity Project is joining the Roosevelt team

This week, Roosevelt and the People’s Parity Project—founded by law students in 2018 to build a legal system that works for working people—announced that PPP’s staff, network, and programming will be integrated into the Roosevelt Institute over the fall and winter.

The network of lawyers and law school chapters who make up the People’s Parity Project will join the broader community of legal scholars and practitioners already engaged across the Roosevelt Society.

After having spent a decade redefining the charge of economic policymakers, Roosevelt is now working to transform the legal profession into one that can deliver for the working class.

“Bringing this legal network into the Roosevelt Society allows us to build that capacity in a profession that has enormous influence over how rules shape people’s lives and what government can do to serve the public,” said Roosevelt President and CEO Elizabeth Wilkins.

Like economists, lawyers act as gatekeepers of what is possible in public policy—through their interpretation of the law, advice to government agencies, and decisions on whether ambitious policies survive litigation.

“We founded PPP on a simple belief: Practicing law is never neutral,” said Molly Coleman, PPP’s cofounder and executive director. “Every lawyer and judge is making choices about whose interests the system serves, and they should answer for those choices to the public, not just to each other.”

Read the announcement: Roosevelt Institute Launches Legal Leadership Pipeline to Shape Law, Policy, and Economic Power

What else we’re up to

• Black homeownership is no panacea for the racial wealth gap. Despite appearing to be an easy fix, homeownership is an uncertain investment for Black Americans, largely due to the racism embedded within the housing market. Roosevelt Fellow Zawadi Rucks-Ahidiana breaks down why in a new brief:
  • Black Americans have unequal wealth to begin with, are discriminated against in the housing market, and gain less from asset appreciation—partly because of how Black neighborhoods are devalued.
  • “Although homeownership is not the answer to the racial wealth gap, the realities of homeownership make it clear that reform is needed to protect existing and new Black (and Brown) homeowners and homebuyers, as the existing Fair Housing Act has not solved the problem,” Rucks-Ahidiana writes.
  • Read the brief: Homeownership Is Not a Solution to the Racial Wealth Gap
• Different age groups are faring differently in today’s job market. Roosevelt Principal Economist Michael Madowitz joined C-SPAN’s Washington Journal to discuss the economy, explain his latest analysis of the labor market, and take listener questions.
• AI companies would love to play by their own safety rules. We can’t let them. “We live in a democratic society,” Roosevelt Senior Fellow Graham Steele said to the Associated Press about the AI industry’s attempts to evade government regulation. “Are [the AI companies] the right ones to have the power to be able to make decisions that have broad, structural, social, and political consequences?”

What we’re talking about