In the aftermath of Dobbs, EU institutions and leaders have started to mobilize to defend reproductive freedom. However, the EU’s current approach to abortion access – which regulates it through economic and human rights frameworks – not only contributes to a stratified system of care, but also risks privatizing and depoliticizing the issue.
Boycotts and international sanctions both represent alternative means of lawmaking that challenge the liberal legal order. But while the disruptive potential of boycotts has largely been contained, international sanctions have evaded the constraints of international law. By looking to the social-movement roots of international sanctions, we might be able to imagine an alternative to today’s world of unfettered unilateral economic coercion.
Ntina Tzouvala on Genocide and Political Economy at the ICJ, Chloe Thurston and Emily Zackin on the long history of American debtor politics, and James Kilgore, Emmett Sanders, and Kate Weisburd on the many myths of electronic monitoring. Plus, Amy Kapczynski reviews Mehrsa Baradaran’s new book, Noah Zatz discusses the court order enjoining the UC grad students’ strike, Beatrice-Adler Bolton interviews Maryam Jamshidi about securitizing the university, Beatrice Cherrier launches a ten-part series on discounting, Gali Racabi shares a new open-access work law textbook, a new roundtable at Inquest looks at the role of prosecutors in dismantling mass incarceration, Tony Smith reviews a recent collection on Marxism and the Capitalist State, and the Progressive Talent Pipeline is looking for people to train and recommend for staff roles in Congress and government agencies. Could this be your year?
The most common argument in favor of electronic monitoring in the criminal and immigration systems is that, even with its drawbacks and punitive features, monitoring is better than incarceration. While sometimes appropriate, this rationale is frequently deployed in problematic ways — on the basis of faulty reasoning and to the detriment of those whom it purportedly benefits.
While recent conventional wisdom has held that it is futile to organize voters around debt relief, a longer view reveals that there is nothing inevitable about the lack of debtor mobilization. Through the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, debtors repeatedly demanded protection in times of economic distress — a history that contains important lessons for our present moment.
Traditional interpretations of the Genocide Convention construe the crime of genocide in notoriously limited terms. By contrast, South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ represents an effort to construct a historically-grounded and political economy-informed understanding of genocidal violence.
While scholars have recently highlighted the role of law in democratic backsliding, they have largely ignored the actors who wield this tool: lawyers. Yet as the guardians of the legal legitimacy upon which autocratic legalism depends, the profession is a critical arena of democratic struggle that merits special attention.
The uncompensated work that law students perform to run the field’s journals is best understood as part of an economy of prestige: an opportunity to burnish one’s resume in hopes of landing a lucrative or high-status job after graduation. Among other problems with this arrangement, it leaves American legal scholarship vulnerable to repression. Recently, however, journal workers have begun to organize around the conditions of their labor – an effort that has the potential to transform the landscape of legal publication and, in doing so, contribute to a culture of increased solidarity in law schools themselves.
Formal and informal associations in prisons are vital providers of food, financial support, physical security, education, news, legal representation, and more. The volume and scope of associations in prisons lay bare the diversity and extremity of needs that the state fails to meet, while also suggesting shortcomings with a patchwork approach by civil society for providing for critical public needs.
Of the estimated 350,000 chemicals now on the global market, only a handful have been properly tested. And as the looming crises with forever chemicals and micro-plastics make clear, we are only just beginning to grasp the enormous toll that these novel entities are taking on human health. How did our environmental law allow this to happen? And what can be done to correct it?
Presented with a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, corporations and right-wing trade associations have launched a series of constitutional challenges to worker rights. In response, workers are putting forward a fundamentally different vision for our economy and society — an alternative not only to business’s right-wing constitution but also to the New Deal constitutional settlement.
The Biden Administration’s recent foray into industrial policy relies heavily on voluntary inducements to push firms to invest in renewable energy technology and domestic manufacturing. Some observers argue that this approach, commonly known as “derisking,” will yield paltry results: firms will pursue the same priorities they would have absent the legislation, just with a better financial return. Yet subsidies do not only alleviate risk; they also impose a new risk of falling behind competitors, and so mold the landscape of profitability into a disciplinary force itself.
The United States has long used economic coercion in hopes of achieving “economic peace” in Israel/Palestine. Yet its vision of this peace has notably shifted over time. While earlier sanctions punished those who disrupted the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” or undermined neoliberal dreams of global commercial integration, Biden’s recent sanctions against West Bank settlers aim primarily to secure a peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, relegating Palestinians to observer status.
While every possible form of pressure should be brought to bear on the Biden administration to cut off the flow of arms to Israel, the prevailing law and policy debate tends to obscure some key aspects of how U.S. imperialism actually works. For the United States does not simply ship arms abroad, it is also the world’s leading arms trafficker, wielding enormous power over how weapons made by other countries circulate throughout the world as an immense collection of commodities.
On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission enacted one of the most significant regulations of the Biden years: a comprehensive ban on non-compete clauses. Now the FTC must defend its rule in court.
