Much as Reagan invoked the welfare queen as a diversion to absorb public outcry against devastating cuts to the social safety net, Trump today offers trans people - with their supposedly abundant, easily accessible healthcare - as scapegoats to justify a broader conservative health policy agenda.

A new tendency within American conservatism is borrowing leftwing critiques of the rightwing status quo. What is the Trad Dad Populist and what kind of political economy does he hope to construct?

Next week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that may allow some employees to foist the cost of their religious exercise onto their co-workers. Such an outcome, beyond its obvious unfairness, threatens to reduce collective labor power. Workplaces and unions rely on a sense of reciprocity, mutual support, and solidarity. But if employers are required to inflict the burdens of one religious worker’s accommodation on their fellow employees, workers may come to see themselves as competitors, rather than allies. By pitting workers against each other, the Court threatens to dissolve workplace solidarity and sabotage workers' ability to act collectively.

As recent Supreme Court cases make clear, the libertarian and Christian wings of the conservative legal movement have orchestrated a two-step process to shift the allocation of public resources to private religious power. First, privatize public goods and services. Second, eliminate the distinction between religious and secular in the newly empowered private sphere. Their objective is to replace the New Deal settlement not with a libertarian vision of market freedom, but rather an arrangement in which the market is embedded in a conservative Christian social vision.

This post was originally published at Jacobin. Last Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity is prohibited by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The decision brings employment law in line with public opinion: a majority of Americans favor employment protections for LGBT…

Dear Readers, When Amy Kapczynski introduces law and political economy, she often begins by describing a paradigmatic law student who arrives ready to fight injustice and is quickly sucked into an alienating vortex of efficiency-seeking and cost-benefit analyses. I was that student when I started law school, and by chance stumbled into the nascent LPE…