The whistle is sounding in Minneapolis. The question before the legal profession is whether we will hear it, amplify it, and act accordingly, or instead insist that the ground eroding beneath our feet is temporary and manageable.
As the government seeks to erase the past injustices and achievements of marginalized groups, it is worth recalling how those gains were made. Parents, partners, students, and lawyers pursued a more just future at significant personal and institutional risk. Their courage offers a lesson for the present. At stake is whether this moment marks a temporary break in the long arc toward justice, or the beginning of a far grimmer chapter.
Seventy-two University of Minnesota Law faculty address the federal government’s ongoing campaign of fear, intimidation, and violence against Minnesotans.
Nathan Yaffe on the immigration agencies openly defying federal courts, and Sabeel Rahman and Jocelyn Simonson on the Part IV problem in legal scholarship. Plus, Michael Macher traces the bipartisan origins of Trump’s immigration crackdown; Eric Blanc, Claire Sandberg, and Wes McEnany advocate targeting ICE’s corporate collaborators; David Austin Walsh discusses socialism in one city; Alondra Nelson examines the Trump administration’s more intensive and less transparent approach to AI regulation, William Boyd analyzes the White House’s push for emergency auctions in the largest wholesale electricity market in the country, and Vincent Mancini, Marshall Steinbaum, and Robert Stutchbury propose an antitrust exemption for independent contractors.
Edie, James, Eve, and Liz highlight some of their favorite posts from 2025.
Many on the left continue to view cryptocurrency as little more than a grift. Yet the crypto industry aims to achieve something much more dangerous: functional monetary sovereignty. Their infrastructures create new conditions for exchange, wealth, and information. By ignoring these developments, we increasingly live in a dystopian world of monetary fiefdoms, and we find ourselves lacking the legal imagination to meet the moment.
Rohan Grey and Amanda Parsons on the law and political economy of cryptocurrency, Sandeep Vaheesan on antitrust reform as an instrument for democratizing economic life, Zohra Ahmed and Madiha Tahir on the Trump administration’s escalation against Venezuela, and Quinn Slobodian on the dim prospects of centrist post-neoliberalism. Plus, a “freedom from want” writing award, the birth of a new NYC policy shop, a look at how money does and doesn’t influence elections, a tutorial on the Netflix-Warner Bros Merger, and a new paper on the jurisprudential question of our times: how should you think about a Supreme Court that doesn’t care what you think?
In the recent exchange between the Marxists and the antitrusters, much of the disagreement has turned on different understandings of the project of antitrust reform. What is its animating goal? Is antitrust a substitute or complement to other forms of regulation? And how does antitrust relate to broader political movements? Identifying rival stances that one might take on these questions can help clarify this debate, while also showing how antitrust law can serve as an instrument for democratizing economic life.
A call to join the ranks of the Association for Law and Political Economy, an interview with Bench Ansfield about the business of arson, and a new entry by Amna Akbar in our symposium on Free Gifts. Plus, Andrew Elrod and Marshall Steinbaum lay out a vision for rebuilding higher ed, Katie Wells and Lindsay Owens examine algorithmic pricing at instacart, Sam Moyn discusses the radical centrism of the legal academy, Genevieve Lakier, Mark Tushnet, and Mike Seidman debate whether we need the courts to protect free speech, and Ben Tarnoff extols the possibilities for digital sewer socialism.
In Free Gifts, Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism’s persistent failure to value the natural world. Yet the lesson of this exploration is much broader: that capitalism imposes fundamental limits on our collective freedom.
In today’s polarized political discourse, it is easy to forget that the Bible’s economic values align better with LPE’s market critiques than with the neoliberal right’s twentieth-century synthesis. And it would be a mistake to surrender these resources to the post-liberal right.
As public-private partnerships become central to modern governance, FOIA’s Exemption 4 has evolved into a powerful tool for corporate secrecy. After Argus Leader, government agencies and private firms can thwart transparency through confidentiality pacts, shielding significant public spending and regulatory decision-making from democratic oversight.
Law and political economy scholarship, immersed in a particular history of Northern law and capitalism, has tended to focus on US law and policy, with occasional excursions into Europe. But in a world where imperialist ideas and technologies tend to circle back to the metropole, and where the periphery appears to be the future of the center, the Global South has much to teach LPE about law, capitalism, and development.
While legal clinics have long been vulnerable to pressure from outside forces, recent attacks by the federal government represent an alarming new level of interference. Protecting clinical work now requires not only legal and institutional defenses, but collective preparation and solidarity across the profession.
Antitrust may promise to tame corporate power, but it leaves untouched the deeper logic of capitalism that compels production for profit’s sake. In this sense, antitrust is not voluntarist enough, choosing to fight capital with one hand tied behind its back. At the same time, however, antitrust places too much faith in law as a source of normative authority and in an administrative state whose legitimacy is evaporating before our eyes.
