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Essay

How Corporations Hijacked Identity Politics

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Over the past fifty years, corporate advocates have co-opted the language and tactics of modern social movements to graft identity-based attributes onto the corporate entity. These new, personalized dimensions are deployed to weaken corporate regulations and, unlike more traditional forms of lobbying, endure beyond any single campaign. Taken together, they. . .
Essay

A Century of Colonial Tariffs

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Waived overnight in response to a crisis for capital but maintained in the face of protest from former and current territories, the Jones Act has a colonial logic that is impossible to ignore. Yet recent constitutional challenges have done precisely that, refusing to acknowledge the Act’s imperial origins and on-going economic harms.
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: March 27

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Sam Moyn and Jamelle Bouie on legislative supremacy, Mariano Féliz on Argentina’s debt sustainability, Ntina Tzvouala on dollar hegemony (x2), Ivana Isailović on the LPE of Social Reproduction in the EU, Mohini Mookim and Veryl Pow on prefigurative lawyering, Adam Hanieh on the economic significance of the Strait of Hormuz, and JW Mason on his. . .
Essay

Of LPE and Legislative Supremacy

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Beau Baumann’s case for legislative supremacy offers a compelling vision for the left. However, branding it as a form of “constitutional politics” risks obscuring its deeper claim: that nothing, not even the Constitution, should stand above democratic lawmaking. His vision will also face significant opposition from liberals and progressives, many. . .
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: March 20

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Beau Baumann on the lost art of constitutional politics, Hal Singer on the market definition trap, and Ben Gerstein on the political economy of settler retrenchment. Plus, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez and Paul Sonn explain how cities and states can help boost funding for labor organizations, Samuel Bagg and Shai Agmon discuss the critical role of friction in. . .
Essay

The Political Economy of Settler Backlash

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When courts recognize Indigenous sovereignty or jurisdiction over contested lands, governments and corporations often respond with warnings of potential economic chaos. These claims of uncertainty are not neutral forecasts but a recurring strategy of settler retrenchment aimed at preserving existing property regimes.
Essay

The Market Definition Trap

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Antitrust defendants increasingly prevail not by disproving competitive harm, but by dragging plaintiffs into costly battles over market definition. As courts have broadened the rule of reason and complicated the evidentiary standards for proving market power, these threshold fights have become a structural barrier to antitrust enforcement.
Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: March 13

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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. . .
Symposium

The Politics of Capitalist Legitimacy

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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

Weekly Roundup: March 6

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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. . .
Symposium

Modern(izing) Indian Capital?

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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. . .

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