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?
With Elon Musk plowing his wealth into a pro-Trump super PAC and Jeff Bezos blocking the Washington Post’s endorsement of Harris, it’s easy to overlook the more direct anti-democratic power of the entrepreneurial elite. Their economic power — the ability to shape the future of our society in utterly unaccountable ways — requires no insidious corruption of democratic procedures or public officials. The entrepreneur rules us without ruling through politics.
Recent years have witnessed a sea change in consumer protection, ushered in by a new generation of enforcers who reject many of the basic premises from the neoliberal era. They aim not merely to ensure that consumers have the information necessary to discipline firms through choice, but to prevent businesses from using their power to shape markets in ways that take advantage of consumers.
While current analyses of fascism tend to focus on interwar Europe, for George Jackson and other political prisoners, fascism represented the general tendency of the capitalist class to destroy revolutionary consciousness wherever it threatened the established economic order. On this view, rather than being a twentieth-century ideology, fascism was already present in the practices of colonialism and enslavement.
Butler’s speculative fiction uses the freedom dreams of Black Americans to show how the structure of a political economy not only reflects but also shapes legal concepts. By challenging the perceived permanence of existing power structures, Afrofuturism creates space for envisioning new, emancipatory futures.
Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis’ new book, Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis, is both a polemic and a guide. Drawing on their experiences organizing with the Los Angeles Tenants Union, Rosenthal and Vilchis envision a world where tenants control housing – a liberatory horizon that legal scholars, lawyers, and law students alike have a clear role to play in reaching.
As the water level drops on Lake Powell, we have a chance to restore both the habitat of Glen Canyon and an earlier approach to public energy provision, when natural resources were shielded from capitalist exploitation and harnessed for the public good.
Recent calls for the use of boycotts, divestment, and economic sanctions against Israel may seem to stand in tension with another position widely held on the left: the condemnation of economic sanctions as neo-imperial warfare. However, we can resolve this tension by recovering a central insight from the period of anticolonial lawmaking.
Given threats to the current system of labor rights protection — as well as unions’ increasing willingness to take an active role in addressing controversial political issues — the often overlooked Norris-LaGuardia Act is primed to take on new relevance in coming years.
Soon after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, the news filled with panicked complaints about “retail theft.” This manufactured crisis replicates the longstanding strategy of the Chamber of Commerce in nurturing a conservative backlash to social movements.
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.
