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.
Given the manifest flaws of the U.S. Constitution, how did Americans come to idolize this document? Aziz Rana kicks off a symposium on his new book, The Constitutional Bind, by reflecting on the path that led to our current political predicament, and how long-buried Left thinking about state and economy might help us find our way out of it.
That public defense is in a state of crisis is far from controversial. Crushing caseloads and rampant underfunding have created untenable working conditions under which even the most well-meaning defenders often struggle to effectively represent their clients. And yet, Jocelyn Simonson, in her important new book Radical Acts of Justice, identifies a deeper, more existential crisis facing public defense — not one of funding, but of purpose.
The activists depicted in Radical Acts of Justice challenge the idea that criminal prosecutors represent “the People.” But where did that idea come from in the first place? By tracing the long shift in American history from informal, non-professional law enforcement to our current system of formal, bureaucratized law enforcement, we can better understand the terrain on which contemporary popular justice movements are waging their struggles.
Campus culture wars over DEI programs, gender nonconformity, and student debt cancellation might seem like distractions from the real problems facing higher education. However, they all tell us something important about the purpose of higher ed, because they all concern the central questions of hierarchy and its reproduction.
Despite the outsized attention afforded to a handful of elite, private colleges, most students attend public institutions within 50 miles of their home. The recent curriculum wars in different states, as well as disparities in state-level funding, mean that where one lives will play an increasingly important role in both the accessibility and content of higher education.
The most important work of legal scholarship in some time, Jocelyn Simonson’s Radical Acts of Justice raises, but does not develop, two major sets of questions. The first concerns the role of the Constitution in freedom struggles; the second, the legitimate role (if any) of violence in transformative left politics in the United States.
