In The Quiet Coup, Mehrsa Baradaran takes the conversation about neoliberalism beyond the realm of economics, focusing instead on legal revolutions, the conservative reaction to the Civil Rights Movement, the legacy of decolonization, and the alliance between libertarians and the Christian Right.
Is the power wielded by interests groups ultimately good or bad? To answer this question, we need to distinguish ordinary interest groups from super-groups, like the American Medical Association, whose legal empowerment makes them legitimate targets for democratic contestation and provides a principled basis on which to assess their political influence.
Landlords wield significant power over tenants — including the power to set prices, surveil, neglect, harass, and evict — while legal processes offer little to tenants in terms of protection or means of redress when their rights are violated. Withholding rent in response to mistreatment is one righteous way of resisting such domination.
In recent years, the LPE movement has generated compelling positions on the limits of the courts and the promise of the administrative state. Yet it is striking how little it has had to say about about legislative procedure and politics. By focusing on how power can be durably built in Congress, LPE scholars could help envision democratic alternatives to our current institutional doom spiral.
Far from posing a threat to academic freedom, DEI Statements offer a common-sense tool to obtain information intrinsic to faculty merit.
Antitrust enforcers have recently begun to treat abusive labor practices — such as worker misclassification and noncompete agreements — as unfair methods of competition. But this approach is not new. Since the early twentieth century, labor advocates, legislators, and judges have all recognized that when employers mistreat their workers to obtain cost advantages, they harm both workers and their competitors.
According to a common antimonopoly narrative, prior to the merger wave of the 1980s, antitrust enforcement kept the meatpacking industry competitive and relatively decentralized — a situation that enhanced farmers’ autonomy and bargaining power. Yet a closer look at the historical record reveals that this fierce midcentury competition also undermined the unionized labor force and New-Deal regulatory regimes that previously dispersed power. Correcting this narrative should encourage antimonopolists not to become too starry-eyed about “competition” as a market regulator.
New research reveals that more than two-thirds of U.S. workers are subject to electronic monitoring, and that more intensive productivity monitoring is associated with higher levels of anxiety, needing to work at unsafe speeds, and a higher likelihood of serious injury.
After a recent First Circuit decision, private creditors’ bankruptcy rights pose an existential threat to the only electric utility in Puerto Rico. As this outcome shows, we need a new approach to balancing the interests at stake in bankruptcy proceedings — one that protects private property, but not at the expense of undermining major public goods.
New research reveals the extent to which chain coffee shops, restaurants, and big box stores in Black neighborhoods offer a lower quality consumer experience than their counterparts in whiter neighborhoods.
The DOJ’s price-fixing suit against RealPage, which has uncovered brazen collusion among competing landlords across the United States, is a welcome departure from decades of hands-off antitrust enforcement. Yet with prices going up in industry after industry, and so few price-fixing cases brought in recent years, it appears many businesses have determined that the risk of collusion is worth the reward.
In the wake of their recent defeat, Democrats’ natural tendency will be to concede the issue of immigration to Republicans and embrace cruelty-lite versions of their opponents’ positions — a strategy that is bound to fail. Instead, Democrats need to offer their own agenda for immigration and internal migration. To do so, they should look to institutional experiments from a forgotten past.
Though the urban-rural divide can sometimes appear like a primordial fault line in American political life, it is a relatively recent development. The Democratic Party’s collapse in the countryside was the predictable consequence of decisions to prioritize certain constituencies to the neglect of others, as it championed the shift to the metropolitan knowledge economy.
The articles, blogs, exit polls, charts, tweets, and skeets that have been helping us make sense of the 2024 election.
Faced with increasingly dire housing challenges, tenants and organizers have called on federal administrative agencies to impose rent regulations, curb discriminatory screening practices, and limit the grounds for eviction. But will such regulations survive in a post-Chevron world? And, if not, might they nevertheless serve long-term fair housing goals?
