The SEC’s recent effort to rescind a longstanding shareholder-proposal rule reveals a novel strategy for entrenching deregulatory policy: disclaiming the authority to regulate in the first place.
In thinking about how to regulate AI as a public utility, there are two big questions: which layers of the AI stack warrant regulation, and which tools of public utility law are best suited to each layer?
As cities across the country fight to take back control of their utilities, Milwaukee’s Sewer Socialists demonstrate what cities can achieve through local ownership, and why state regulation often serves private interests over the public good.
To make medicines more affordable, policymakers are increasingly turning to price controls and out-of-pocket caps. These measures, while lowering costs, leave decisions about which drugs to manufacture and distribute in private hands. If patients are to have reliable access to the medicines they need, the government must take on a more direct role in development, production, and provision.
To protect customers from rising electricity prices, public officials are urging data center developers to supply their own power. But this approach risks privatizing the power grid, worsening the climate crisis, and eroding electricity’s status as a public good.
Administrative law is often described as “transsubstantive”: in understanding, evaluating, and articulating the rules governing federal agency action across public health, environmental regulation, national security, and sundry other domains, law schools and legal scholarship treat administration as a single enterprise. What would it take to move beyond transsubstantivity and make administrative law more attentive to context? A recent project on drug scheduling offers some insights.
What the history of multilevel marketing can teach us about our political moment.
When seen through the prism of the kafala system, it appears that the Trump administration seeks to consolidate and formalize the most extractive features of the U.S. migration regime.
As Sam Moyn has recently argued, “class reductionism” fails to explain differentiation along the generational gradient — a pattern clearly visible in economics, politics, and ideology. Yet a clear picture of how age mediates class would reveal not gerontocracy, but capitalism and the fractionated class system it produces.
Employment discrimination law is primarily concerned with exclusion from good jobs. Yet this leaves unaddressed a corresponding problem: employers seeking out marginalized workers in order to reduce worker pay, degrade working conditions, and minimize the chance of unionization.
The rise of AI demands legislative action to mitigate its many risks. But rather than follow the same old regulatory playbook, Congress should instead embrace creative tax policy.
Between 1917 and 1921, twenty-one states passed criminal syndicalism laws. These laws, which were intended to help eliminate the Industrial Workers of the World, have largely faded from public memory. Looking back, however, we can see a formula for anti-left repression that has proven durable and widely appealing: the limitation of political speech and organizing in the name of property protection.
On this blog and elsewhere, Congress has recently been cast as a cure for our decrepit democracy. This push for legislative primacy is a mistake: it valorizes a deeply undemocratic institution, relies on a selective reading of the past, and distracts us from vital debates about the policies we should be pursuing and persuading others to support.
Industrial policy will often require picking winners: if there were already many domestic firms capable of producing the desired output, there would be no compelling reason for subsidy or special treatment. Yet in doing so, the government risks locking in dominant firms and foreclosing the competition it ultimately needs. How might policymakers avoid this trap?
A renewed focus on the cost of living crisis is a welcome and potentially unifying frame for the political left. Yet unless we confront the Trump administration’s consolidated economic, cultural, and bureaucratic power, any attempt to deliver an affordability agenda is bound to fail.
