On Monday, we revisited our ten most read posts of 2025. Today, we conclude our year with a bit of curation, as our editorial staff highlights some of their favorite posts.
Edie
Back in January, the Blog published Elizabeth Popp Berman’s thought-provoking post, “In This Brave New World, Does Scholarship Still Matter?” Confronted with the unsettling thought that policy-adjacent scholarship might not be much use in a world without relatively stable legal and political institutions, Popp Berman described the virtues of “zooming out” and turning toward more historical work: “My intuition is that the decades that set us down this path still matter—that the legal and institutional building blocks of corporate capitalism are the DNA of the present. But it’s clearly a bigger gamble than betting that the events of the 1970s and 80s were still relevant to 2022. Bigger gambles, though, may be exactly what we need right now.”
Responding to Popp Berman, Luke Herrine advocated instead for a more focused approach. The current moment, he argued, is a good one for zooming in: “We need more people — and especially more ambitious thinkers — in the weeds. The weeds are where we will need to be to think about how to build new and better institutions out of the wreckage.”
Something I love about the Blog is that it serves as a forum for both large-scale “zoomed out” thinking of the Berman-ian persuasion and more immediate and wonky, “in the weeds,” scholarship. And this year, we’ve published many excellent examples of both.
In the (relatively) zoomed out category, I particularly enjoyed Jedidah Britton-Purdy’s “The Political Economy of the Current Crisis,” which uses a wide lens to highlight the roots and idiosyncrasies of the current constitutional crisis, and Ntina Tzouvala’s “On Tariffs and the Ends of International Economic Law,” which draws on Veblen’s theory of capitalist sabotage to identify both the continuities and the novelty of Trump’s tariff policy. Both posts do a particularly good job of taking a step back without losing sight of the present moment. I’d also be remiss not to mention the lively debate kicked off by Gabriel Winant’s “Marxism and Antitrust: A Provocation,” which, in its engagement with the question of how we get from the highest levels of abstraction to the concrete realm of politics and policy, elaborates on the Berman-Herrine colloquy.
Of the posts with a more magnified lens, I especially liked Benjamin Sachs’ “Did Trump Just Empower States and Cities to Regulate Labor Relations?” Diving into the weeds of labor law, Sachs suggests that Trump’s firing of Gwynne Wilcox may have unwittingly created a new opening for local regulation. I also enjoyed two posts that explored Medicare reimbursement issues, Fumika Mizuno’s “A Dialysis Duopoly: How Public Funding Entrenched Private Power” and Elle Rothermich’s “Hospice Commodification and the Limits of Antitrust.” For those in the mood to probe the limitations of old approaches and consider novel paths forward, these posts make a wonderful double-feature.
James
On Tariffs and the Ends of International Economic Law by Ntina Tzouvala. Veblen! Value chains! International trade law! Ntina Tzouvala’s post on Trump’s unapologetic embrace of tariffs has a little bit for everyone. It also grapples with one of the more perplexing questions of the past year: if Trump’s tariffs have no identifiable constituency within America’s capitalist class, then who do they serve?
Solidarity during the Second Red Scare: The Lessons of Thomas Emerson by James Bhandary-Alexander. Before reading this post, I knew nothing about the life and times of “Tommy the Commie.” But his story—helping found the National Lawyers Guild, defending communists in court, producing scholarship so threatening to the government that the FBI broke into his office to steal an early draft of his work—is that of a life well lived. As Bhandary-Alexander argues, it also offers valuable lessons about how to navigate the treacherous waters of political persecution and rising authoritarianism.
What Stands in the Way of Abundance in Healthcare? by Amy Kapczynski. Published during the doldrums of summer, and perhaps overlooked by some readers for that reason, Amy Kapczynski’s post on recent public initiatives to manufacture insulin remains the most compelling critique of the “abundance” agenda that I read this year. As she explains, although states are capable of producing high-quality, affordable medicines, there are significant private interests that will stand in the way of such efforts at every step. Unless we recognize the challenge posed by private power and build the political will to overcome it, plans to expand public production, in healthcare or elsewhere, are unlikely to succeed.
The Anti-Democratic Rise of Super-Property by Jedidiah Kroncke. Most readers, I suspect, have some sense that modern trust law, by insulating property from taxation and reporting requirements, primarily serves the rich. Less appreciated, however, is just how strange this situation is. As Jed Kroncke points out, trust law was originally a creature of equity, devised as a creative solution to protect the assets of vulnerable parties, such as a child who had lost their parents. If you want to know how this perversion of trust law came about, and why it confronted so little democratic resistance, check out Jed’s brilliant post!
The Political Economy of Trans Healthcare Bans by Kate Redburn and A.D. Sean Lewis. Why is the Trump Administration so hell-bent on attacking trans people? This question deserves more attention than it has received, and as Kate Redburn and A.D Sean Lewis’s post makes clear, a satisfactory answer to it will show significant continuities between Trump’s attacks on trans lives and a broader attempt to undermine the basic social provision of care on which we all depend. It’s a must-read, particularly for any democratic operatives who think that the solution to Trumpism is to abandon trans people and hope the slashing and burning of the state won’t reach them on higher ground.
A few final shoutouts: the entire series on Alyssa Battistoni’s Free Gifts is worth your time, but as someone not steeped in Marxist theory, I particularly appreciated Rob Hunter’s brief tour of value form theory. My own ignorance (this time, about China) also partially explains why I found Jed Britton-Purdy and Shitong Quio’s conversation about neighborhood democratization in China so fascinating. Who knew that HOAs could be a Tocquevillian hotbed of democracy? Katie Wells and Funda Ustek Spilda’s look at how gig nursing companies are facilitating a race to the bottom among healthcare workers is the kind of piece that will cause you to corner people at parties and tell them about it—or at least, that’s what reading it did to me! David Abraham’s comparison between the current political-economic situation and that of Weimar made evident to me just how unreliable American capital has been in defending democracy. And, finally, Fumika Mizuno’s post on the history of the dialysis market—a case study in how public funding can entrench private power in health care—might be my favorite student post published during my time at the Blog.
Eve
Antitrust has long been a subject near and dear to the Blog’s heart. This past fall, however, we broke new ground with a series of posts that probed the relationship between antitrust and a rival intellectual tradition, Marxism. In his opening salvo, Gabe Winant outlined the intellectual and methodological differences between Marxism and antitrust, asking how the two nevertheless might inform each other. And in a series of responses, Sanjukta Paul, Marshall Steinbaum, Matthew Dimick, and Sandeep Vaheesan considered, inter alia, how the categories foundational to Marx’s analysis of capitalism are themselves shaped by social and legal rules, whether antitrust places too much faith in law as a source of normative authority, and the extent to which antitrust can empower labor and democratize economic production.
Another of my favorite series, and one that may be worth revisiting as healthcare costs loom large in the coming year, was our symposium on healthcare consolidation and market power. These posts explain why it’s hard to measure a treatment’s value, what’s standing in the way of public options in healthcare, the pitfalls of value-based payment, America’s dialysis duopoly, and states’ efforts to curtail private equity’s voracious appetite for healthcare facilities.
And a few more of my favorites: Madison Condon’s post on whether climate change should really be thought of as an externality—part of our symposium on Alyssa Battistoni’s Free Gifts. Hilary J. Allen’s post on how the subsidies given to the venture capital industry are enabling regulatory arbitrage. Eliza Martin’s essay on how utility customers are fronting the bill for big tech’s data centers. And if you’re game for a foray into corporate law, Katharine Jackson’s post provides an interesting argument that the recent amendments to Delaware’s corporate law capture a political shift in corporate governance driven by populist CEOs and their allies.
Liz
Hello again, LPE blogosphere! This year, I decided to organize my favorite posts into themed trilogies, tripartite offerings that together deepened my understanding or ability to grapple with the challenges 2025 hath wrought. Without further ado…
On Our National Nightmare:
- “On Constitutional Crisis, the Rule of Law, and the Fate of Democracy,” by Jedediah Britton-Purdy: Considering Trump’s devil may care approach to his first year back in office, the importance of “the rule of law” has been a constant refrain around the law school. As I found myself struggling to reconcile the supposed sanctity of this concept with an LPE understanding of law as often no more than a market-serving construction, this piece – like all the best scholarship – both named my confusion and defogged the analytical playing field.
- “The Long Anti-Tax Tradition of American Oligarchy,” by Vanessa Williamson: This piece sews together the continued degradation of America’s ability to tax, the complete domination of our politics by the wealthiest Americans, and the powerlessness felt by everyday folks. As Vanessa puts it, “Without taxation, there is no representation.”
- “Post-Neoliberalism is the New Centrism,” by Quinn Slobodian: To my mind, the best (only?) good thing about Trump II is the way it has laid bare Americans’ distaste with elites and the twenty-first century synthesis. This post offers a chilling insight – elites across the political spectrum are busy crafting and coalescing around a different narrative.
On Where to Turn:
- “Rebuilding State Authority in a Post-Trump America,” by Beau J. Baumann: Since the courts won’t save us, and Trump has crystallized the dangers of progressives’ long-preferred executive-forward strategy of governance, where should LPEers turn in the post-Trump reconstruction moment? Beau suggests that both a “new political basis for administration” and “putting Congress at the center” might do the trick.
- “After the FTC’s Retreat: How States are Rewriting the Rules on Worker Mobility,” by Jonathan F. Harris: But we don’t have to wait until we regain control of the federal government to make meaningful policy gains on antitrust, consumer protection, and labor relations (just to name a few). Though state action alone is no panacea (I’m from North Carolina, where progressive legislation is…highly unlikely), states that can experiment with big swings can “provide the blueprint” for when “federal opportunity returns.”
- “Why Local Officials Need to Embrace a Movement-Centric Ethos,” by Arti Walker-Peddakotla & “Labor Organizing in a Time of Legal Chaos,” by Alvin Velazquez: These two pieces challenge us to look beyond “legal” solutions, leaning on organizing (in our communities, in our workplaces) to attempt transformative action that is politically possible. Rather than waiting for “government sanction” or “comply[ing] in advance,” this moment demands an offensive posture.
On Our Socialist Future:
- “A Dialysis Duopoly: How Public Funding Entrenched Private Power,” by Fumika Mizuno: When we do have power, what should our policies look like? In this piece, Fumika elegantly uses the dialysis market to explain how universal access (the goal of progressive policy darlings like Medicare for All) that is reliant on private provision risks further entrenching private power, consolidation, and domination.
- “Intel and the New State Capitalism” by James Fallows Tierney: Is Trump taking equity stakes in domestic firms a good (socialist) policy? This piece helps to clear the dust and draw a clear distinction between imaginative, “genuine industrial democracy” and what Trump is really up to: “structur[ing] markets so that public risk underwrites private gain.”
- “Why Public Ownership?” by Brett Christophers: If de-privatizing critical social infrastructure (housing, transportation, etc.) is LPE’s policy north star, how do we make (and win) the case? Rather than defending public ownership on democratic grounds—arguments that I often find wanting—this piece instead argues the juice is in ensuring coordinated and fast investment in essential industries where mega-profits aren’t guaranteed.
On the Topic I Avoid Like the Plague (Tech):
- “How the Left Lost the Plot on Crypto (and How to Find It Again),” by Rohan Grey: I have long struggled to conceive of crypto as anything other than a techno-grift, choosing total ignorance on this subject of massive financial importance. Rohan helpfully calls out this inclination, shared by many on the Left, as “a clear strategic mistake” and sketches a concrete regulatory framework for the path forward.
- “You’re Paying Big Tech’s Power Bill,” by Eliza Martin & “Antimonopoly and Artificial Intelligence,” by Ganesh Sitaraman: Eliza breaks down the confusing morass of utility regulation, the electric grid, and the advent of data center ubiquity to present why the public is currently on the losing end of the AI infrastructure revolution. Ganesh, then, helpfully demystifies the seeming totality that is AI, concretizing the pieces that constitute its all-encompassing existence and explaining how familiar progressive policy prescriptions (antitrust, public options, etc.) are up for the task.
- “Why We Need to Stop Subsidizing Venture Capitalists,” by Hilary J. Allen & “A Populist CEO in Corporate Law’s Court?,” by Katharine Jackson: These pieces unpack two of tech’s animating features, explaining how “prominent fintech businesses have found a competitive edge not in technology itself, but in using narratives about technology as a smokescreen for the profitable arbitrage of financial regulations,” and how tech overlords weaponize culture wars and appeal to populist sentiment to “trample ordinary laws, norms, and institutions” and “live by their own rules.”
On…Pieces I Just Really Enjoyed:
- “The Anti-Democratic Rise of Super-Property,” by Jedidiah Kroncke: Throughout law school, trusts have come to represent the ultimate get out of jail free card, existing on some higher plain that allows the rich to avoid the laws that bind the rest of us. This piece confronts that ridiculousness, illustrating how this wild invention of financial engineering and regulatory capture came to be, and underscoring that any path to social welfare runs through fixing trust law.
- “The Authoritarian Commons: An Interview with Shitong Qiao,” by Jedediah-Britton Purdy: This lovely interview explores how democracy has flourished within the day-to-day goings on of China’s burgeoning homeowners associations. From stories of the glory that comes from working with your neighbors towards some collective goal to the frustrations that come from inevitable challenges like free riding, the piece offers an interesting case-study in everyday democratic practice, located within a context quite different from our own.
- “How Antipoverty Advocates Can Go on the Offensive,” by Ezra Rosser: Last, but certainly not least, this piece – which explains how a robust necessity defense for homeless people, hinted at in the absurd cruelty of the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass decision, could destabilize the exclusionary rights of private property owners – has been constantly on my mind! Ezra suggests that this reframing could create new political energy behind antipoverty policy, with “necessity forc[ing]…those with private wealth to recognize that so long as public spending does not adequately address their basic needs, the poor have valid claims to public, as well as private, land.”
