Unlike most modern constitutions, the U.S. Constitution famously lacks any social welfare rights. At least, it did until 2018. Over the past five years, the Ninth Circuit has created a right unique in the American constitutional tradition: an effective license for homeless individuals to sleep on public lands.
Disagreement over recent TikTok legislation reveals a deep divide about our current political moment. Should we, like many of the bill’s proponents, assume the existence of a functional, liberal state whose machinery tends toward justice? Or do recent illiberal trends give us reason to reject this assumption? Before we move to further concentrate global surveillance and propaganda power in the hands of the United States, we should be clear-eyed about the threats to speech and privacy that emanate from within.
To be homeless, Jeremy Waldron has famously argued, is not merely to suffer from unmet needs – to be cold or hungry or exposed – but also to be unfree. In what sense, however, does homelessness make one unfree? And what is the relationship between this unfreedom and the law?
Since the late 20th century, free trade has been defended primarily by neoliberals who cared little about social justice or democracy. However, a longer examination of free trade’s relationship to left-wing politics paints a very different picture. Recovering the history of those who defended free trade from the left may help us envision an alternative to the escalating economic nationalism we see today.
Next month, the Supreme Court will decide whether it is constitutional for cities to punish unsheltered people for sleeping outside, even when the city fails to provide any safe alternative. Yet, no matter how the court rules, homeless people will still face significant threats from cities.
Javier Milei’s labor policies in Argentina highlight two often overlooked features of contemporary capitalism: the emergence of new labor subjects and the role of violence in processes of labor precarization. This production of precarity serves as a mechanism for framing certain lives as disposable and bolsters illegal economies that are increasingly replacing the welfare state’s promise of social inclusion.
A ruling that tech companies don’t have to comply with neutral regulations would not just block two sloppy laws, it would put a block on politics itself. This is a moment for the Court to stand back and allow democracy to work its clumsy, painful magic.
The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments extended citizenship to formerly enslaved persons. But what did this status entail? In the subsequent political debates over abolition, one view carried the day: a contract and property-based notion of citizenship that fortified rather than unsettled antebellum era social relations. To realize the promise of Reconstruction today, we need a bolder vision of citizenship, one rooted not in marketplace imaginaries but in the elusive yet powerful concept of human dignity.
Why have less-educated Americans, long the base of the Democratic Party, flocked to Republicans in recent decades? New research shows that much of this change can be explained by the Democratic Party’s evolution on economic policy, as the party gradually moved away from its traditional emphasis on “predistribution policies” (favored by less-educated Americans), instead embracing redistributive tax-and-transfer policies (favored by more-educated Americans).
This morning, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in the most anticipated cases of the year for the future of regulating tech platforms. While much of the debate will focus on whether the platforms are best analogized to publishers, there is another important argument that the Supreme Court will confront: whether platforms are “common carriers.”
Despite what you may have heard on Fox News or read in the New York Times, the crisis at the U.S. border with Mexico is neither about the border, nor about migrants’ impact on the country. Rather, the staging of a border crisis is an attempt by Republicans (and unwitting democrats) to put in place new machinery of social reproduction.
In their statement calling for a ceasefire between Israel and Palestine, the UAW International Executive Board raised a tantalizing possibility: What if UAW workers were to divest their labor from the construction of weaponry? Under current labor law, how might workers make their complicity in the military-industrial complex a mandatory subject of bargaining?
From Afro-Diasporic laborers building the Panama Canal to contemporary Micronesians trafficked to work in Iowa’s pork industry, the labors of “territorial peoples” have been central to America’s economic rise. This often overlooked history is both an indictment of our constitutional tradition and a harbinger of the tactics of legal disempowerment deployed against labor writ large.
Reagan’s 1986 Tax Reform Act, which slashed the highest marginal tax rate from 50 to 28 percent, was one of the largest and most regressive tax cuts in the history of the United States. New research shows that it also caused an increase in campaign contributions among the wealthy – demonstrating how rising economic and political inequality reinforce one another through public policy.
Reports of the FTC’s “poor” win-loss record have been greatly exaggerated. But how should we understand antitrust agencies’ progress so far?
