An LPE account of the global food crisis, two new entries in our symposium on Coerced, an amazing LPE job at HLS, a symposium on William Novak’s New Democracy, and some podcast episodes to help digest the Supreme Court’s most recent term.
While employers have long conflated status with vulnerability, workers are starting to show how status itself can also be as a source of power — one that the courts, co-workers, and the public increasingly see as justification for broad-based change.
Employers wield power over workers by virtue of control over their institutional status and not solely, or even principally, by virtue of the power to cut off wages. Yet, in attempting to distinguish “status” and “economic” coercion, we must avoid the idea that status is implicitly non-economic and the economy operates apart from the social.
Economic coercion is not the only power dynamic that shapes labor relations. In a range of cases – including prison laborers, welfare workers, college athletes, and graduate students – employers exercise power over workers by controlling their “status” and all of the rights, privileges, and opportunities that such status confers.
A call for courage in the wake of West Virginia v. EPA, a reckoning with the arc of the American rights tradition, and a discussion of what it would take to build worker and union power in the 21st century economy. Plus, an upcoming all-star Antimonopoly event and a recently released state-level antimonopoly reform guide.
To understand this precarious constitutional moment, we must look back not only to our forgotten anti-oligarchic tradition, but also to the strategies, practices, and ideas that led to earlier moments of retrenchment.
Each year, the Supreme Court hears roughly 65 merits cases. The administrative state, meanwhile, issues thousands of rules. Given this institutional reality, along with the inherent vagueness of the so-called major questions doctrine, the worst mistake an agency can make is to clip its own wings.
Six friends of the blog offer their initial impressions of the Supreme Court’s recent decision about California’s Private Attorney General Act (PAGA)
A critique of recents changes in the subsidized childcare market, a look at courtrooms where no one knows the law, and a case for de-collateralizing the housing market. Plus, jobs, events, and summer academies.
Under financialized capitalism, corporate investors value homes not solely or primarily for rental income, or even as assets that can be bought and sold—but rather because they serve as collateral. Three episodes of institutional change in housing markets underscore the importance of not only decommodifying land and housing, but decollateralizing it.
Many cases that have a profound effect on poor families, such as whether they will lose their home to eviction or whether a parent will go to jail, are argued in courtrooms where no one, not even the judge, knows the law.
By paying greater attention to who files bankruptcy, we can learn a great deal about the social and economic disparities that plague our society. By reforming and expanding access to bankruptcy, we can chip away at some of these disparities.
The adoption of fossil fuels to power the world economy has depended upon a fossil law that arranges a particular type of market and enforces a particular balance of power. One understudied, but central, aspect of this process is the use of state and corporate violence to compel the extraction and consumption of oil, gas, and coal.
Ted Hamilton is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bucknell University, cofounder of the Climate Defense Project, and the author of Beyond Fossil Law: Climate, Courts, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future.
In response to the likely fall of Roe, commentators have suggested that tribal lands might serve as safe harbors for abortion in conservative states. While tribes ought to possess the territorial authority to regulate reproductive healthcare as they see fit, this proposal overlooks important legal, financial, political, and ethical considerations that make the prospect of such safe harbors unlikely.
