By misstating the holding of SFFA in a recent dear colleague letter, the Department of Education has created a gap between what the law requires and the agency’s interpretation of the law. This gap, in addition to inviting anticipatory overcompliance, risks giving rise to inconsistent policies at different colleges and universities.
The Trump administration is simultaneously dismantling, weaponizing, and centralizing state capacities in order to enact a reactionary vision of administration — one which seeks to roll back efforts by prior generations to equalize economic and social relations. In contrast to this vision, progressives ought to aspire to a regulatory state whose purpose is to prevent domination. This alternative vision can guide us in deciding which forms of administrative power we should build and which we should actively work to restrain.
Legal scholars must grapple with the emergence of a new state capitalism — defined by expanded modalities of statist intervention, growing state-held capital, and intensifying geoeconomic rivalries.
Tech elite’s turn towards far-right politics should be understood as part of a broader effort to suppress collective power and worker activism. Organized labor is crucial to challenging the influence tech oligarchs wield across society and within the tech industry.
Attempts to solve the affordable housing crisis rely on a flawed understanding of housing economics and landlord business practices. In reality, landlords are colluding to manipulate the market. Antitrust law could be the answer.
Recent Supreme Court decisions threaten to undermine administrative efforts to achieve housing justice, including the mandate to affirmatively further fair housing and a loan program that provides affordable rural rental housing to disadvantaged families.
Four Supreme Court decisions concerning the power of the administrative state have left agencies increasingly vulnerable to attack. Each decision is significant on its own, but together they underscore the precarious position of agency action today.
The Trump Administration’s open rejection of due process and equal protection echoes some of the darkest aspects of antebellum America, when black Americans were frequently kidnapped and disappeared into the South without recourse. Yet this history also shows that direct legal representation can play a powerful role in mobilizing public opposition to unjust policies and proceedings.
In September 2024, an anonymous donor gifted $100 million to the University of Chicago to promote free speech. A closer look at dark money’s role in manufacturing campus free speech crises reminds us to be highly skeptical of understandings of campus speech funded by elite interests, especially when they replace institutional deliberation with a legalistic absolutism that leaves hierarchies of wealth and power unchallenged.
Universities’ decisions in dealing with the 2008 financial crisis laid the foundation for the current financial and social crisis in higher education.
The tech arm of Trump 2.0 isn’t just reshaping government — it’s consolidating control over the data infrastructure that makes modern governance possible. By centralizing data flows and gutting public information systems, DOGE is building the machinery for a new era of authoritarianism.
Silicon Valley tech bosses often promote Universal Basic Income as a progressive solution to job losses caused by automation. However, by portraying such displacement as inevitable rather than socially determined, these proposals obscure the critical role that power structures and market dynamics play in shaping technological innovation. They also fail to address how automation further concentrates control over technology, production, and data.
Many unitary executive proponents argue that federal labor rights undermine presidential power. This position is simplistic and short-sighted: labor rights offer the executive a different, more valuable form of power – expanded state capacity – that is necessary for modern presidents to deliver on their political priorities. And they so do in a manner that is more democratically accountable than any of the likely alternatives.
For decades, the rules of international trade helped cement U.S. firms at the top of global value chains. Should Trump’s unapologetic embrace of tariffs be understood as part of a broader loss of faith in those rules among American policymakers? Or is it something else entirely — a bid to remake the relationship between capital and political power within the United States itself?
While debate over AI regulation in the United States has largely focused on safety, the future of AI progress will also be determined by market structure. To ensure continued innovation, policymakers must use antitrust tools to protect competition at all levels of the supply chain — from hardware and cloud infrastructure to models hubs and consumer applications.
