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.
When vacant land and structures fall into the hands of the state, new possibilities emerge. How can local governments transform these assets into co-governed spaces?
In a society as deeply divided as our own, it is fanciful to think that we will be able to deliberate our way to a consensus. To resolve the longstanding puzzle of the administrative state’s democratic legitimacy, we need to resist the neoliberal impulse to erase politics and, instead, design opportunities for genuine contestation.
Week 7’s readings address the historic and contemporary relationships between labor and anti-monopoly. Three key themes cut across these readings. First, several of the readings discuss how antitrust law has historically been used—and continues to be used—to stifle worker organizing and collective action, despite the original pro-labor purpose of the antitrust laws. As the readings…
Week 4 dives into a second key tool in the anti-monopoly and regulated industries toolkit: antitrust. Several of the readings discuss the origins and inadequacies of the predominant approach to antitrust law today—a court-centered regime driven by a focus on consumer welfare. Reviewing Tim Wu’s The Curse of Bigness, Lina Khan charts the “decades-long project…
Kate Jackson on the democratic virtues of administrative agencies, Luke Norris on a progressive vision of civil procedure, and the Sustainable and Global Economic Law research project invites you to summer in Amsterdam!
Civil procedure is the infrastructure of democracy, allowing the public to interpret, elaborate, and entrench constitutional-regulatory commitments over time. Rather than sidelining courts entirely, a revival of the democracy-of-opportunity tradition should include a progressive vision of procedure.
