At the Blog
On Monday, Mehrsa Baradaran continued our symposium on Melinda Cooper’s Counterrevolution, arguing that neoliberalism is best understood as a rearguard movement against the expansion of democratic rights. As she writes, “Finding themselves on the losing side of moral progress, rightwing intellectuals and politicians had to turn the tables. In fact, they succeeded often by coopting the moral arguments of the equality movements, which they used in service of protecting the existing hierarchy. Some of the earliest legal challenges to abortion rights, for example, were frequently framed in terms of racial justice. Anti-abortion activists ‘appealed to the Declaration of Independence, with its affirmation of an unalienable right to life, and to the Fourteenth Amendment’ to argue that the unborn deserved equal protection and due process like any other racial minority…. And though the Supreme Court initially rebuffed such arguments, by the time of Dobbs, the Federalist Society judges that now dominate the Court—one of the triumphant prizes of the neoliberal counter-revolution—embraced them.”
On Tuesday, Angela Harris examined the sharp decline in academic freedom in recent years, and what it will take to defend the university from both state and market forces. As she writes, “Academic freedom’s grounding in this dense network of practices and norms means, as Amy Kapczynski has written, that academic freedom is deeply structural. Protecting academic freedom means not only protecting the rights of mistreated individuals, but also preserving the labor regime that makes the exercise of those rights possible…. In short, professors are workers, and without worker protections freedom of expression means nothing.”
And on Thursday, NLRB attorney’s David Boehm and Lynn Ta explained the promise of America’s forgotten labor law – the Norris-LaGuardia Act – and why it is primed to take on new relevance in the years ahead. Adopted in 1932, the Norris-LaGuardia Act stripped federal courts of jurisdiction to enjoin labor strikes, outlawed yellow dog contracts, and recognized the “freedom of labor” as a fundamental right of all workers. As the authors write, “With the current labor apparatus under attack, we face the distinct possibility that workers may have no effective means to enforce their rights under the NLRA; this would also, however, include hobbled enforcement of the strike and boycott restrictions of the Taft-Hartley amendments. Under such a situation, the labor movement would likely enter an era of labor militancy and radical strike activity, the likes of which precipitated the NLRA’s passage. And with more varieties of strikes available—from wildcat strikes to sit-down strikes to jurisdictional strikes—Norris-LaGuardia could again become central to legal disputes over labor actions.”
In LPE Land
Mark your calendars: on Wednesday, October 16th at 12:10pm ET, join us (at Yale or on zoom) for a lunch talk with Sandeep Vaheesan, the legal director at the Open Markets Institute, to discuss his forthcoming book Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States.
Quinn Slobodian invites you to submit proposals for an upcoming conference on Neoliberalism and the Capitalists, which will take place at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, in May 2025. Proposals of no more than 400 words by November 1.
In Democracy, Amy Kapcynski makes the case for industrial policy as democratic practice.
In Dissent, JW Mason discusses the possibility of industrial policy without militarism.
In Phenomenal World, Andrew Elrod asks: What Was Bidenomics?
Over at Balkinization, the symposium on Jeremy Kessler’s “Law and Historical Materialism” continues, with an incredible set of entries from Matthew Dimick, Eva Nanopoulos, Yochai Benkler, and Talha Syed.
The Knight Institute has launched a new series on “Student Protests, Title VI, and the First Amendment,” with an opening post from Evelyn Douek and Genevieve Lakier on Title VI as a Jawbone.
Finally, if you have some money to spare, Verso could use your help: its UK distributor recently filed for bankruptcy, which has left the publishing house in the lurch and facing a financial crunch for its fall 2024 season.
