At the Blog
On Monday, Darryl Li discussed the weaponization of federal courts against the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Right. In a bizarre case before the D.C. Circuit appeals court, the Jewish National Fund is leading a lawsuit against the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, a nation-wide coalition of groups advocating for Palestinian liberation, on accusations of supporting terrorism. As he writes, “The bombastic argumentation and weak legal reasoning are very much the point here: A plaintiff like the JNF, with billions of dollars in assets, stands little to gain financially from suing the Campaign but has money to burn when it comes to waging lawfare against Palestinians and their allies. Lawsuits such as these are designed not so much to win as to fester, aiming to generate just enough suspicion to drag the Campaign into discovery and with it, years of financially ruinous litigation.”
On Tuesday, #RuralLaw powerhouses Emily Prifogle and Jessica Shoemaker continued our symposium on the LPE of Rural America by explaining how property law has constructed and maintained racial disparities across our rural landscapes. As they note, although there are more than 900 million acres of privately owned farmland in America, nearly all of it (98%) is owned and controlled by people who are white. This, despite the fact that farmworkers, nationally, are 62 percent racial minorities and 80 percent Hispanic. Similarly, some of this country’s most notorious and persistent regions of concentrated poverty are both rural and racialized.
And on Thursday, Christopher Ali turned our attention to the rural-urban digital divide, and how new FCC broadband maps have consistently exaggerated broadband availability, depriving many rural communities of much-needed funding and infrastructure. As he writes, “What the past and present of the FCC’s mapping efforts demonstrate is an obfuscation of responsibility and a subsumption of what should be a public mapping process to the market. Shifting such crucial responsibility from the regulator to industry serves the political economic interests of both CostQuest and private providers, the latter of which will be the beneficiary of billions of dollars of public investment. On the location fabric side, rural, remote and tribal communities are being systematically erased and thus seeing their digital hopes dashed once again.”
In LPE Land
Roll Call: Did you or a scholar whose work you love have an article accepted at a law review this cycle? If so, let us know! In the next week or two, we’re hoping to publish a round-up post, highlighting some of the hottest LPE-relevant forthcoming work from this cycle. Send nominations to managingeditor@lpeblog.org with (i) a link to the forthcoming piece, either on ssrn or the screenshot/abstract on twitter; (ii) a 1-3 sentence description of the piece; (iii) and where it will be forthcoming. Self-nominations are highly encouraged.
Call for Student Accounts: A 3L at Boston College Law School is working on a project tracking the work being done teaching critical race theory and race in the law in American law schools, including the role of student activism. She is looking for stories where students demanded, created, or otherwise influenced such courses at their law schools. If you or someone you know has a story to tell, please email her at forcinoi@bc.edu.
As you might have heard, the past week has witnessed a classic #bankrun at Silicon Valley Bank, along with subsequent moves by the FDIC (covering uninsured depositors) and by the Fed (launching a new lending facility) to stabilize the financial system. In case you haven’t been keeping score at home, there has been some excellent coverage by LPE scholars and friends-of-the-blog: Nathan Tankus with a one-stop-shop explainer, Lev Menand talking about the need for better bank supervision on Odd Lots, Lev Menand and Morgan Ricks on the case for scrapping the FDIC’s insurance cap, Rohan Grey and Nathan Tankus on twitter spaces. And, as goes without saying, it’s always a good time to read Saule Omarova’s research on how to redesign the financial system.
Over at Inquest, Kiyomi Bolick argues that public defenders need to harness union power.
In the NYT, Quinn Solobodian discusses the significance and ubiquity of those geographic curiosities where regulations and taxes are often suspended, letting investors effectively dictate their own rules.
