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Revisiting The Constitutional Bind during the Interregnum
Revisiting The Constitutional Bind during the Interregnum

Revisiting The Constitutional Bind during the Interregnum

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As the country marks 250 years, the left faces two imperatives at once: confronting a constitutional order warped by judicial supremacy, and reorienting American foreign policy away from endless war. A central insight of Aziz Rana’s The Constitutional Bind is that these two crises were forged from the same fire, and may need to be resolved together.

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Age and the Lure of Class Reductionism

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Gerontocracy in America has elicited a common refrain from critics: that class, not age, is the real problem. Yet this kind of class reductionism has largely been rejected when it comes to gender and race, and age should be no exception.

Muskism as Fordism

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Coined by a German economist in 1926, Fordism came to describe the dominant political-economic order of the mid-twentieth century. Could “Muskism” play a similar role in the twenty-first? How should we understand its distinctive regime of accumulation, and what kind of social contract does it propose?

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Essay

Against Legislative Primacy

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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.
Essay

The Dilemma of Picking Winners

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Industrial policy will often require picking winners: if there were already many domestic firms capable of producing the desired output, there would be no compelling reason for subsidy or special treatment. Yet in doing so, the government risks locking in dominant firms and foreclosing the competition it ultimately needs. How might policymakers avoid this. . .
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: June 26

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Amy Kapczynski on LPE and social science, Sam Moyn on the class reductionist response to Gerontocracy, and Rakeen Mabud on why the affordability frame needs a power analysis. Plus, a bevy of new essays, papers, and events, covering the history of the consumer price index, left critiques of the constitution, the international right to strike, worker. . .
Essay

Affordability Politics Needs a Power Analysis

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A renewed focus on the cost of living crisis is a welcome and potentially unifying frame for the political left. Yet unless we confront the Trump administration’s consolidated economic, cultural, and bureaucratic power, any attempt to deliver an affordability agenda is bound to fail.
Essay

Dispatches from the ALPE Convention Floor

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This past February, hundreds of scholars converged in downtown Richmond for the inaugural Association of Law and Political Economy conference. As interest in the field grows, a larger question looms: can a loose coalition on the academic left turn shared critiques of the status quo into a durable movement?

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Managing Editor James Brandt Editoral Board Zohra Ahmed Corinne Blalock Veena Dubal Luke Herrine Amy Kapczynski Aziz Rana Kate Redburn Ntina Tzouvala Lisa Washington Noah Zatz Student Editors Liz Brown Edie Conekin-Tooze Eve Zelickson
Student Editor Emeriti Sam Aber Ashraf Ahmed Will Bloom Adam H. Bradlow Matthew Buck Brett Davidson Isabel Echarte Tariq El-Gabalawy Berto Elysee Molly Gordon Jeff Gordon Ruthie Lazenby Talya Lockman-Fine Chloe Miller Andrew Miller Roxana Moussavian Lydia Nicholson Ure Obioma