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.
Unable to realize enough profit from their portfolios to repay their investors, landlords are turning the screws on tenants in the form of rising rents and declining conditions. Understanding this financial distress points us beyond questions of supply to a more nuanced analysis of the political economy of rental housing, revealing the market interventions needed to unlock tenant power.
In Argentina’s recent debt renegotiations with the IMF, the overriding goal has been to ensure the government can meet all future payment obligations. Yet the conditions imposed to achieve this aim have deepened a crisis of social reproduction, rendering life itself unsustainable.
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 of whom remain tempted by courts and presidential power.
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.
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.
If we are to realize the dream of post-Trump reconstruction, policy reform will not be enough. We must articulate a constitutional politics capable of dismantling both juristocracy and the modern managerial presidency.
Weeks after pardoning former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández for drug trafficking, Donald Trump ordered U.S. forces to seize Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro on the same charges. How should we make sense of these seemingly contradictory actions? And what do they tell us about the true purpose of the War on Drugs?
Over the past year, the much-touted right-wing embrace of anti-monopolism has been reduced to a distant memory. What has emerged instead is a personalist form of market governance, where regulatory authority persists only insofar as it serves the ambitions of political insiders.
In recent decades, work hours have sharply diverged: high-wage workers are logging more time on the job, while low-wage workers face shrinking hours. Rather than trying to fix this imbalance by creating more work, policymakers should redistribute work through stronger overtime protections and a shorter workweek. Yet for this approach to succeed, highly paid white-collar workers will have to confront their own attachment to a work-based social order.
In the early 20th century, foreign companies operating in Brazil would extract profits while using thinly capitalized subsidiaries to directly employ their workers. When things went wrong, workers were left with worthless claims while capital remained safely sheltered in the foreign-located parent companies. To address this issue, in 1937 Brazil adopted a novel legal innovation: imposing joint and several liability on parent companies for labor obligations. Recovering this history reveals that legal innovation often flows from the Global South, that limited liability is neither natural nor universal, and that seemingly technical corporate law doctrines are deeply entangled with questions of distribution, power, and sovereignty.
In countries facing democratic backsliding, attention often centers on state capture of the press. Recent U.S. media failures, however, demand a wider lens. Authoritarian encroachment here rests on deeper layers of capitalist and oligarchic capture. Understanding how these different layers interact and reinforce one another is a necessary first step toward building a more democratic media system.
The whistle is sounding in Minneapolis. The question before the legal profession is whether we will hear it, amplify it, and act accordingly, or instead insist that the ground eroding beneath our feet is temporary and manageable.
When Congress eliminated taxes on overtime last summer, it framed the move as a win for workers. However, by encouraging people to spend more time on the job, the policy runs directly counter to the original purpose of overtime laws: to protect workers’ personal time and give them greater control over their lives. A better agenda would involve shortening the workweek, increasing the overtime premium, and banning mandatory overtime.
A decade ago, Martin Shkreli became the most hated man in America by raising the price of Daraprim – an antiparasitic essential for immunocompromised patients – from $17.50 to $750 per pill. Though Shkreli’s conduct was lambasted in the court of public opinion, the legal framework that allowed this 4,000 percent increase remains in place. And Daraprim? It still costs $750 a pill.
