BS, MEng, Cornell University. MA, PhD (Honors), The New School for Social Research. Moudud is a board member of the Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and the Law and a co-founder and on the editorial board of the Journal of Law and Political Economy. He is also on the editorial board of the journal, Money on the Left. As a contributor to the contemporary Law and Political Economy intellectual movement, his work focuses on understanding the nature of corporations and money and the ways in which constitutional clauses structure socioeconomic inequalities. Professor Moudud is currently working on a book entitled, Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism: The End of Laissez-Faire?, to be published by Routledge as part of its Economics as Social Theory series. He is a Fellow in the Political Economy of Corporations Curriculum Project, University of California Berkeley. SLC, 2000–
Research and Interests
Over the past few years few years I have developed two new passions in my life, one of which is to study legal theory and legal history and their links to political economy, and the other is the electric guitar. On the law/political economy nexus, my focus is the study of the legal foundations of markets and of money and to understand how conflicts over property and contracts are at the heart of our economic system. This has led me in an intellectual direction that rejects the public/private divide, at the heart of much thinking in economics, and provides the basis for a new way of conceptualizing policy which is quite distinct from both the neoclassical and much of the alternative traditions in economics. In this endeavor I have been heavily influenced by Karl Polanyi, the Legal Realists (especially Robert Lee Hale, Wesley R. Hohfeld, and Morris N. Cohen), and the broad Critical Legal Studies tradition. I am involved with two exciting new scholarly groups, the Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and the Law (APPEAL) and ClassCrits. I am also collaborating with colleagues in these two groups to launch the Journal of Law and Political Economy. Finally, I am an Associate Editor with another journal, the Review of Keynesian Economics.
As for my electric guitar, I have found that in playing blues and classic rock the complexity of piecing together the notes to create a song oddly enough parallels the ways in which societies are constructed at a foundational level. Who would have thought that Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane or Deep Purple could be so profound!
