The United States’ turn toward naked coercion and transactional deal-making represents both a genuine departure from its commitment to the liberal international legal order and the culmination of that order’s internal contradictions.

What is this thing called capitalism? What, if anything, is the use of legal theory in understanding capitalist society? Is anything gained, or anything lost, if we replace the phrase “Law and Political Economy” with “Legal Theory and Capitalism”? Answers to these questions (and more!) in a hot new double issue of Law & Contemporary Problems.

Amna Akbar interviews Joe Soss and Joshua Page about how the criminal legal system extracts resources from the nation’s most oppressed communities and converts them into public and private revenues.

As we work toward a durable democratic future, a commitment to legislative primacy can serve as an orienting north star. Reaching that goal, however, will require using both legislative and executive tools, especially while we are working with an imperfect, hobbled, and significantly co-opted legislature.

A selection of worthy additions to your “important PDFs” folder.

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?