This past Friday, the Supreme Court granted cert in a case that concerns the first religious charter school in the United States. But this case is not merely about school choice or religious freedom — it also reflects a broader contest over how law structures public responsibility and private power.
One in three Americans has a debt that has been handed over to a collection agency. Lawmakers continue to throw credit at the problem and punish borrowers when they struggle to repay. To escape this cycle, we need an approach to debt relief based on the principle of human dignity, a foundational concept in human rights law.
The Supreme Court’s unanimous affirmation of the TikTok Ban reveals a dangerous weakness in the First Amendment: its failure to protect against government repression that targets the economic infrastructure of speech, rather than speech itself — precisely the kind of repression that is likely to be a hallmark of the second Trump presidency.
Trumpist unity is largely a fiction conjured by the Democratic Party in a naïve attempt at “defending democracy.” A robust opposition must seek and target wedges within the Trump coalition, pitting conservatism’s component parts against one another.
Tenant unions, unlike labor unions, operate without extensive federal, state, or local legislative schemes governing their form and behavior. This does not mean, however, that they are unaffected by the law. By looking at tenant unions at work in Kansas City, Chicago, and New York City, we can see the different ways in which law influences their form, tactics, and strategies to scale advocacy.
An increasing number of universities want to restrict their leaders from speaking about issues of public concern. This push for “neutrality” is a key piece of a broader conservative campaign to suppress speech that conservatives don’t like. It also offers a lesson about what we can expect of powerful institutions in the second Trump era.
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.
