The struggle over Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination for the US Supreme Court and the subsequent horrible spectacle of the Senate hearings brought about a “genuine question” by a leading economist, Dani Rodrik: “how do we prevent ‘the Supreme Court has always been political’ argument from morphing into ‘judicial independence and the rule of law are political…
Judge Brett Kavanaugh, now very close to controlling the decisive vote on the Supreme Court, resembles other candidates for high political office. He has a constituency–the Federalist Society, anti-abortion activists, everyone who hopes to see Obamacare weakened and affirmative action ended–and other constituencies in opposition. Lots of money is being raised and spent for and…
The nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is on the knife’s edge. The stakes are higher than for the confirmation of any American judge in our lifetimes. For that reason alone, it is probably not a good time to stage a general debate whether and in what sense law is something more than…
Thursday’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing was a stomach churning, nauseating affair. Christine Blasey Ford laid her life on the tracks, knowing full well that trains delivering important men can rarely be stopped. That was enough, but then came the turn: Brett Kavanaugh, partisan warrior. He tore into Democrats for a process almost entirely dictated by…
Introduction: From ‘Accounting For’ to ‘Accountable To’ In an earlier post I welcomed legislation recently proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren. Her Accountable Capitalism Act, I suggested, not only bids fair in the long run to render incorporated business firms less sociopathic, but also affords in the short run a fine opportunity to recall what…
Last month Senator Elizabeth Warren proposed an innovative – or better yet, restorative – new piece of legislation to the US Senate. Something like the Senator’s Accountable Capitalism Act, which would, among other things, hold corporations accountable to other stakeholders besides shareholders, is long overdue. It is in consequence much more than welcome. This owes…
The concept of economic competition is central to policymaking deliberation in this country. Yet even as our understanding of that concept evolves to take better account of corporate power, our thinking about competition retains a fundamental blind spot. Simply, the boundaries of the business firm insulate many instances of economic coordination that would be deemed anti-competitive…
As divided as we have become as a country, we arrive at this Labor Day with a shared national understanding: both economic and political power are wildly out of balance, with dire consequences for the vast majority of Americans who find themselves on the losing end of this imbalance. Wherever we live, and however we…
Legal advocates have scored some major class-related victories in 2018. In January, an appellate court held that the administration of California’s money bail system violated the Fourteenth Amendment rights of indigent defendants. In February, the Fifth Circuit held Harris County’s money bail procedures unconstitutional on the ground that they keep the “poor arrestee” behind bars…
The Democratic Party is once again dividing into a left versus center configuration, just in time for the November Election. The catalyst for this renewed debate appears to be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s massive primary upset in New York’s fourteenth district. Ocasio is a democratic-socialist who has focused on her district’s predominantly Latino and black working class,…
When calling out discrimination is itself forbidden as discrimination . . .
A durable progressive antitrust must invert the prevailing ideology and permit cooperation among workers (and the powerless in general) and condemn the consolidation and monopolization of capital
This week, I published two pieces about economic power. One, an op-ed in the New York Times, distilled some major themes from the Supreme Court’s neoliberal jurisprudence: allowing private power to colonize public law (arbitration), using constitutional rights to protect economic power (First Amendment restrictions on union dues and campaign finance), and deploying federalism doctrine…
Building a popular environmental movement will take longer than suing the government.
On May 30, 2018 the Illinois legislature voted to ratify the ERA. Thirty-seven states have now ratified the sex equality amendment to the U.S. Constitution, just one state shy of the three-quarters required by Article V to validly amend the Constitution. Legal commentary following this news is primarily focused on questions about the amendment’s legitimacy,…
