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,…
In our first post, we made the case for studying immigration enforcement through a political economy lens. Without political economy, we are left with an ahistorical and inadequate understanding of the challenges and realities of immigration enforcement, which implicate both state and market, and not just Donald Trump and Barack Obama, but our colonial past…
Liberals and progressives bemoan the problems of immigration enforcement and deportation along the vectors of racialization and criminalization. Their critique goes something like this: the immigration enforcement system is unfair in how it targets Black and Latinx and other immigrants of color, and this targeting has worsened as immigration enforcement has become increasingly entangled with…
Recently on this blog, Sabeel Rahman and Ganesh Sitaraman detailed the growing interest among public law scholars in questions of power, inequality, and political economy. One feature of the emerging scholarship, they correctly note, is that it directs its attention not primarily to courts, but to legislators and social movements; it focuses not primarily on…
In April, Jack Balkin, Yochai Benkler and I convened a workshop on the law and political economy of technology at Yale Law School. Participants drafted thought papers, which we spent the better part of two days discussing. In the coming weeks, many participants will post revised papers or reflections in a series of posts that…
There’s yet one more way I try to get students to see the mutually entangled systems of capitalism and racism presented by Fant v. Ferguson. Why did Ferguson and other northern St Louis suburbs end up depending on their criminal justice systems for the revenues necessary to run a city?
