Federal courts have overwhelmingly rejected the Trump Administration’s radical expansion of mandatory detention. Despite this, ICE continues to arrest and detain tens of thousands of people each month, effectively nullifying judicial oversight through sheer scale.
At a recent convening devoted to the death of neoliberalism, what emerged was less a rupture with the past than a centrist project of status-quo stabilization.
U.S. attacks on alleged drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean have been widely condemned for violating international law. Yet much of this criticism, by focusing narrowly on the Trump administration’s military excesses, risks repeating a familiar mistake: debating how the United States wages war while leaving unquestioned why it wages it at all.
In today’s polarized political discourse, it is easy to forget that the Bible’s economic values align better with LPE’s market critiques than with the neoliberal right’s twentieth-century synthesis. And it would be a mistake to surrender these resources to the post-liberal right.
In the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, the Trump administration included a brilliant bit of faux-populism: a five-year tuition freeze. The proposal creates the illusion that the right is taking decisive action to address affordability, while obfuscating its larger plan to abandon higher education as a public good. To prevent MAGA from outflanking and corrupting a popular left position, we must embrace ambitious solutions that will actually address the high cost of attending college.
As public-private partnerships become central to modern governance, FOIA’s Exemption 4 has evolved into a powerful tool for corporate secrecy. After Argus Leader, government agencies and private firms can thwart transparency through confidentiality pacts, shielding significant public spending and regulatory decision-making from democratic oversight.
Law and political economy scholarship, immersed in a particular history of Northern law and capitalism, has tended to focus on US law and policy, with occasional excursions into Europe. But in a world where imperialist ideas and technologies tend to circle back to the metropole, and where the periphery appears to be the future of the center, the Global South has much to teach LPE about law, capitalism, and development.
As hospice care is increasingly dominated by private equity firms, an antitrust response, while necessary, has the potential to normalize the language of the market as the default mode for discussing healthcare reform. Hospice demonstrates what is lost when healthcare is described as a mere economic exchange, and Medicare’s per diem hospice benefit harbors as-yet-unrealized potential for decommodification.
Throughout U.S. history, oligarchs have fettered the tax power of the state to ensure that the government would be too feeble to rein in their power. The Trump Administration’s capricious tariffs and mass firings at the Internal Revenue Service are the latest iteration of this long, anti-tax, anti-democratic tradition.
While legal clinics have long been vulnerable to pressure from outside forces, recent attacks by the federal government represent an alarming new level of interference. Protecting clinical work now requires not only legal and institutional defenses, but collective preparation and solidarity across the profession.
As the far right consolidates power at the federal level, many progressive lawyers are turning to state policy or crafting rebuilding plans for after the storm. Yet this moment also offers a chance to adopt a more radical orientation: prefigurative lawyering at the local level. According to this approach, we must create the world we want to live in now, working with movement partners in the co-creation of non-capitalist ecosystems based on care and cooperation.
The Trump Administration’s use of individualized, firm-level waivers and exemptions marks a new frontier in presidential control of the administrative state. This strategy allows the administration to bypass the formal process for repealing regulations while turning deregulation itself into a tool for distributing political favors.
In the current moment, it is not a crisis of capitalism that challenges democracy, but its triumph. For this reason, our political-economic situation is quite different from that of Weimar Germany, whatever continuities and similarities may exist.
While some have cast the U.S. government’s $8.9 billion equity stake in Intel as the first step on the road to socialism, upon closer examination it looks more like a distinctive form of American state capitalism: one that entrenches corporate power while foreclosing more democratic and effective alternatives.
As fascist tendencies intensify across the United States, social movements continue to organize against the forces of state repression. Legal scholars must stand with these movements, grounding our analysis in struggle and supporting those fighting on the frontlines with our relative social power and institutional resources.
