Crisis can be clarifying. Recent events on campuses across the country have forced many of us to look more closely at how our own universities work, including at the decades-long drift toward more powerful university presidents. Reversing this drift, and developing a more democratic model of internal governance, may be a prerequisite not only for rebuilding intellectual community but also for avoiding future campus conflagrations.

The United States has long used economic coercion in hopes of achieving “economic peace” in Israel/Palestine. Yet its vision of economic peace has notably shifted over time. While earlier sanctions punished those who disrupted the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” or undermined neoliberal dreams of global commercial integration, Biden’s recent sanctions against West Bank settlers aim primarily to secure a peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, relegating Palestinians to observer status.

Law students at Columbia, CUNY, NYU, and Yale explain the demands behind the ongoing anti-war protests and offer their reflections from the encampments.

While every possible form of pressure should be brought to bear on the Biden administration to cut off the flow of arms to Israel, the prevailing law and policy debate tends to obscure some key aspects of how U.S. imperialism actually works. For the United States does not simply ship arms abroad, it is also the world’s leading arms trafficker, wielding enormous power over how weapons made by other countries circulate throughout the world as an immense collection of commodities.

Aziz Rana aims to free us from Constitution worship. An abiding faith in “redemptive” constitutionalism, his new book argues, has long held back liberals, progressives, and even the Left from seriously promoting major change in our structures of government. Yet key left figures and movements have always made canny use of redemptive constitutional narratives and arguments. Rejecting that tradition leaves far too much on the table.

Given the manifest flaws of the U.S. Constitution, how did Americans come to idolize this document? Aziz Rana kicks off a symposium on his new book, The Constitutional Bind, by reflecting on the path that led to our current political predicament, and how long-buried Left thinking about state and economy might help us find our way out of it.