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Off with the Lotus Eaters
Off with the Lotus Eaters

Off with the Lotus Eaters

Before the Blog goes on its annual August hiatus, we count down the ten most read posts of 2026 so far, say a fond farewell to our departing student editors, and welcome three new additions to the team.

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Cradle to the Grave

As Sam Moyn has recently argued, “class reductionism” fails to explain differentiation along the generational gradient — a pattern clearly visible in economics, politics, and ideology. Yet a clear picture of how age mediates class would reveal not gerontocracy, but capitalism and the fractionated class system it produces.

Theorizing Discrimination for the Bad Jobs Economy

Employment discrimination law is primarily concerned with exclusion from good jobs. Yet this leaves unaddressed a corresponding problem: employers seeking out marginalized workers in order to reduce worker pay, degrade working conditions, and minimize the chance of unionization.

Twilight of the Gods

Contemporary proponents of law and economics claim to have abandoned the idea that law is an instrument for maximizing economic efficiency and wealth. Corporate law scholars haven’t yet heard the good news.

Recent

What Rolls Downhill

Recent calls for mandatory retirement in academia are a reminder that class and other social hierarchies are something like mountains with increasingly dense fog toward their peaks: the higher up one is, the less one understands that upon which and above which one stands.

Weekly Roundup: July 24

Madison Condon and Luke Herrine on the economics that Law & Economics ignores, Jeremy Bearer-Friend and Sarah Polcz on why we should tax AI equity, Matt Bodie on the persistence of shareholder primacy, and Diana Reddy on theorizing discrimination for the bad jobs economy. Plus, two PhD scholarships available at UNSW Law, a set of new papers from the. . .

Weekly Roundup: July 10

Fifteen of our favorite films on law and political economy, Jeff Gordon proposes an anti-entrenchment industrial policy, M. Sandhu makes the case against legislative primacy, Aslı Bâli revisits The Constitutional Bind during the interregnum, and R.H. Lossin looks back at early-20th-century criminal syndicalism laws. Plus, a CFP for the Conference of. . .

Property, Sabotage, and the Origins of Anti-Left Repression

Between 1917 and 1921, twenty-one states passed criminal syndicalism laws. These laws, which were intended to help eliminate the Industrial Workers of the World, have largely faded from public memory. Looking back, however, we can see a formula for anti-left repression that has proven durable and widely appealing: the limitation of political speech and. . .

Against Legislative Primacy

On this blog and elsewhere, Congress has recently been cast as a cure for our decrepit democracy. This push for legislative primacy is a mistake: it valorizes a deeply undemocratic institution, relies on a selective reading of the past, and distracts us from vital debates about the policies we should be pursuing and persuading others to support.