A new tendency within American conservatism is borrowing leftwing critiques of the rightwing status quo. What is the Trad Dad Populist and what kind of political economy does he hope to construct?
How the encroachment of private capital into the broadband ecosystem threatens local provision and the goal of universal, affordable broadband.
American courts exercise authority beyond U.S. borders, including over foreign governments, all the time. To most observers, this is simply a consequence of increasing economic globalization and legal modernization, which untethered jurisdiction from territory. But this is a mistake. Law has not become divorced from territory but instead actively remapped it; it has not merely responded to globalization, but actively produced it.
What role has Law and Economics played in society and in legal scholarship? A Reply to David Bernstein’s recent critique of LPE.
Before the Blog goes on our August hiatus, we say a fond farewell to our departing student editors and welcome a fresh batch of starship troopers. Plus, to tide you over until September, we count down the top ten most read posts of 2024.
While governments in both the west and global south have become increasingly critical of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, these states have nearly all maintained normal trade relations with Israel. How should we understand this mismatch between political rhetoric and economic policy? And where might we look for signs of more material anti-imperial responses on the horizon?
The rule of law is inherently fragile, as law’s legitimacy ultimately depends on politics. Yet as demonstrated by the successful referendum in Berlin to expropriate more than 250,000 apartments from corporate landlords, this very dependence can empower democratic mobilization and redirect the conservative nature of the law towards a progressive future.
The Supreme Court’s recent administrative law decisions represent a fundamental shift in both political and economic power. In response, we must not settle for simply restoring the status quo ante. Instead, the task for an LPE approach to the administrative state requires answering a more foundational question: what would effective, equitable, and democratic governance look like?
According to international law, third-party states have an obligation to block the transit of arms and jet fuel to Israel.
Over the past decade, private financial markets – the domain of venture capital, private equity, and private credit funds – have grown to the point where they now dominate financial activity. This shift has undermined the protections afforded by existing securities laws and, because pensions are one of the largest contributors to these private funds, has subjected ordinary workers to the opaque, unregulated side of financial markets.
In the aftermath of Dobbs, EU institutions and leaders have started to mobilize to defend reproductive freedom. However, the EU’s current approach to abortion access – which regulates it through economic and human rights frameworks – not only contributes to a stratified system of care, but also risks privatizing and depoliticizing the issue.
Boycotts and international sanctions both represent alternative means of lawmaking that challenge the liberal legal order. But while the disruptive potential of boycotts has largely been contained, international sanctions have evaded the constraints of international law. By looking to the social-movement roots of international sanctions, we might be able to imagine an alternative to today’s world of unfettered unilateral economic coercion.
Ntina Tzouvala on Genocide and Political Economy at the ICJ, Chloe Thurston and Emily Zackin on the long history of American debtor politics, and James Kilgore, Emmett Sanders, and Kate Weisburd on the many myths of electronic monitoring. Plus, Amy Kapczynski reviews Mehrsa Baradaran’s new book, Noah Zatz discusses the court order enjoining the UC grad students’ strike, Beatrice-Adler Bolton interviews Maryam Jamshidi about securitizing the university, Beatrice Cherrier launches a ten-part series on discounting, Gali Racabi shares a new open-access work law textbook, a new roundtable at Inquest looks at the role of prosecutors in dismantling mass incarceration, Tony Smith reviews a recent collection on Marxism and the Capitalist State, and the Progressive Talent Pipeline is looking for people to train and recommend for staff roles in Congress and government agencies. Could this be your year?
The most common argument in favor of electronic monitoring in the criminal and immigration systems is that, even with its drawbacks and punitive features, monitoring is better than incarceration. While sometimes appropriate, this rationale is frequently deployed in problematic ways — on the basis of faulty reasoning and to the detriment of those whom it purportedly benefits.
While recent conventional wisdom has held that it is futile to organize voters around debt relief, a longer view reveals that there is nothing inevitable about the lack of debtor mobilization. Through the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, debtors repeatedly demanded protection in times of economic distress — a history that contains important lessons for our present moment.
