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Weekly Roundup: March 13
Weekly Roundup: March 13

Weekly Roundup: March 13

Seven of our favorite labor scholars and lawyers on how to revive a pro-labor vision of the Constitution, Jeena Shah on how to make sense of Trump’s contradictory treatment of Hernández and Maduro, Noam Maggor on how “good” and “bad” capitalists are not born but made. Plus, a definitive ranking of the top 5,000 legal scholars, an upcoming conference on public debt, an upcoming LPE night school meeting on Social Movements & Municipal Governance, a CFP for LPE scholars dreaming of Switzerland, and last call for the Polan Fellowship in Constitutional Law and History.

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Featured

Whistling at the Edge of Law

The whistle is sounding in Minneapolis. The question before the legal profession is whether we will hear it, amplify it, and act accordingly, or instead insist that the ground eroding beneath our feet is temporary and manageable.

The Means-Testing Industrial Complex

As Republicans tightened work requirements and eligibility rules for Medicaid and SNAP last year, Equifax’s CEO openly celebrated the profits to be made from administering this deprivation. Means-testing and administrative complexity have turned America’s safety net into a lucrative revenue stream for monopolistic private contractors, underscoring the need for public data infrastructure and simpler eligibility rules.

Beyond Feasibility in Legal Scholarship

Law review articles are expected to conclude with a short section, often “Part IV,” that translates analysis into actionable prescriptions. Though well-intentioned, this convention constrains ambition, sidelines critique, and conflates near-term feasibility with rigor. In a moment of institutional unraveling and authoritarian threat, legal scholars and law review editors should resist the Part IV reflex and make space for bolder analyses, longer horizons, and more collective ways of imagining change.

Recent

The Politics of Capitalist Legitimacy

At the core of Jason Jackson’s Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry is a longstanding conversation among Indian modernizers about how to identify and nurture the ‘right’ kind of capitalists. Yet this is not just an Indian story. Struggles over “good” and “bad” businessmen have structured political life in all capitalist societies,. . .

Weekly Roundup: March 6

Veena Dubal and Aziza Ahmed on how feminists transformed the law and science of AIDS, Luke Herrine on market governance in Trumpworld, and Aditya Balasubramanian on the misnomer of modern Indian capital. Plus, a new special issue on Law & Economics vs. Law & Political Economy, Shahrzad Shams and Todd N. Tucker make the progressive case for court. . .

Modern(izing) Indian Capital?

Jason Jackson’s erudite Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry shows that, for more than a century, Indian firms labeled as “traditional” capital faced policy hostility, while those considered “modern” were more likely to receive favorable government treatment. Yet how should we understand the modernity of so-called “modern Indian. . .

Market Governance in Trumpworld

Over the past year, the much-touted right-wing embrace of anti-monopolism has been reduced to a distant memory. What has emerged instead is a personalist form of market governance, where regulatory authority persists only insofar as it serves the ambitions of political insiders.