Civil procedure is political economy all the way down. Helen Hershkoff, Luke Norris, and Judith Resnik kick off a symposium on the subject by describing the promise of procedure to further equal treatment and accountable decision-making, as well as how such aspirations are undercut by resource disparities and efforts to replace the use of courts with private arbitration.
Religious liberty challenges to the Affordable Care Act often appear narrowly focused on exempting specific employers from covering particular types of care, such as contraceptives, sterilization, or gender-affirming care. However, closer examination reveals that such claims should be understood as a major new vector in the campaign against social insurance in the United States.
The rapidly worsening home insurance crisis is often understood as primarily a problem for insurers. Yet the overarching policy question should not be, “how do we save the home insurance industry from collapsing?” but rather, “what role should insurance markets play in the broader suite of policies to keep people safely housed?”
Even though gender classifications have been eliminated from most market domains, they stubbornly persist in the insurance context. To understand this puzzling persistence, we must examine the traditions of mutualism that have shaped insurance as a social institution, and how these traditions embed gender in the tools used to price risk.
Despite the outsized attention they receive, “Ivy Plus” schools are ultimately a footnote in the larger story of higher education. The American system, while stratified, developed in such a way that stratification does not forestall opportunity. To understand this situation, we need to look back at a (failed) crusade to restrict access to college.
Insurers are quasi-sovereign actors that can determine the price and terms of economic inclusion. State insurance commissioners have little leverage over insurers that threaten to withdraw coverage when faced with unfavorable regulations. The story of Prop 103 in California suggests that popular mobilization might serve as a counterweight to insurers’ power.
At both the state and federal level, there are legislative efforts underway to depict students, faculty, and the university itself as potential enemies of the U.S. national security state that must be disciplined and controlled. If enacted, these laws will upend how universities function, who they welcome, and how they teach their students.
In Florida, insurers increasingly rely on external capital to prepare for the possibility of high loss climate events. Sophisticated financial tools such as insurance-linked securities provide a temporary solution to growing climate risk in coastal regions, but in the long run, they do not address the fundamental causes of the insurability crisis.
Municipal liability insurers have often unrecognized incentives to discourage reforms aimed at reducing police misconduct. For insurers, the predictability of losses is more important than the level of losses. This means that they are likely to oppose democratic reforms that create uncertainty and make it difficult to price the risks of police misconduct.
From the health care we receive to the services our cities provide, private insurers wield significant public power. Over the next few weeks, this symposium will examine the sweet actuarial science and its industries from a law and political economy perspective.
Over the past few decades, universities have become some of the largest employers, real estate holders, health care providers, and even policing agents in cities and towns across the country. How did these educational institutions come to exert such power over their communities? One under-appreciated factor is the monetization of “non-profit” campus land.
Aziz Rana’s The Constitutional Bind provides a vital resource for appreciating how the American ideology of constitutional reverence was constructed. Yet insofar as Rana blames such an ideology for thwarting essential democratic reform, we might wonder whether this magisterial work ironically gives its subject too much credit — venerating the very constitutional veneration that it deconstructs.
Crisis can be clarifying. Recent events on campuses across the country have forced many of us to look more closely at how our own universities work, including at the decades-long drift toward more powerful university presidents. Reversing this drift, and developing a more democratic model of internal governance, may be a prerequisite not only for rebuilding intellectual community but also for avoiding future campus conflagrations.
In aiming to unsettle the dominant constitutional faith to forge a wholly different constitutional future, The Constitutional Bind sets its sights breathtakingly high. Whether the book reaches those heights will likely turn on whether it offers a viable path from our creedal constitutional present to such a utopian future.
Aziz Rana aims to free us from Constitution worship. An abiding faith in “redemptive” constitutionalism, his new book argues, has long held back liberals, progressives, and even the Left from seriously promoting major change in our structures of government. Yet key left figures and movements have always made canny use of redemptive constitutional narratives and arguments. Rejecting that tradition leaves far too much on the table.
