In the embers of the Supreme Court’s disastrous Grants Pass decision, a new form of necessity doctrine offers a ray of light. If private property owners’ exclusionary rights are meaningfully threatened, might the political will for ending homelessness and food insecurity finally emerge?
When it’s time to rebuild from the wreckage of the Trump-Musk rampage, the left may have the opportunity to implement a truly transformative agenda. However, unless we have relatively detailed proposals ready in advance, we will lose out to those who merely want to reproduce what came before.
By removing Gwynne Wilcox from her seat on the National Labor Relations Board, Trump has left the Board without a quorum and thus unable to act. In doing so, he may have unwittingly opened up space for states and cities to regulate conduct that previously fell within the Board’s jurisdiction.
Trump’s executive order is not merely unconstitutional. It is an effort to perpetrate the very evils that abolitionists and Republicans sought to eradicate from our constitutional order.
If the recent past is no longer a useful guide to seeking change in the present, what good is policy-adjacent scholarship?
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.
