Administrative law is often described as “transsubstantive”: in understanding, evaluating, and articulating the rules governing federal agency action across public health, environmental regulation, national security, and sundry other domains, law schools and legal scholarship treat administration as a single enterprise. What would it take to move beyond transsubstantivity and make administrative law more attentive to context? A recent project on drug scheduling offers some insights.
Where do profits come from? And how does law legitimate capitalism? To make progress on these questions, we must dig deeper into the nature of capital and the idea of the legal form.
Before the Blog goes on its annual August hiatus, we count down the ten most read posts of 2026 so far, say a fond farewell to our departing student editors, and welcome three new additions to the team.
As the country marks 250 years, the left faces two imperatives at once: confronting a constitutional order warped by judicial supremacy, and reorienting American foreign policy away from endless war.
On this blog and elsewhere, Congress has recently been cast as a cure for our decrepit democracy. This push for legislative primacy is a mistake: it valorizes a deeply undemocratic institution, relies on a selective reading of the past, and distracts us from vital debates about the policies we should be pursuing and persuading others to support.
What is LPE? Is it a reaction to law and economics? Does it have a method? What is its normative north star? At this year’s ALPE conference, Amy Kapczynski, Corinne Blalock, Aslı Bâli, Sabeel Rahman, Angela Harris, and Yochai Benkler offered their best answers to these questions in two sentences or less.
The marginalization of international law under the second Trump administration has been a shock to the post-Cold War world order. Yet the impact of this development on the global economy has been far from uniform. Some of the most important sectors to trade — including telecommunications and civil aviation — were already governed primarily through informal, political arrangements.
As of May 2026, the United States has agreements with at least 27 countries to accept deportees who are neither nationals nor citizens of those countries. Seen from one perspective, this emerging regime looks like a natural extension of efforts by the United States and other countries to externalize refugee obligations and offshore migrant policing. In practice, however, third country deportation is more sinister — more akin to an illegal, “black site” extraordinary rendition than a judicial removal proceeding.
For much of the past century, international lawyers have sought to drive a wedge between “economic” matters and the use of military force. Recent events in the Caribbean and the Strait of Hormuz suggest that wedge is no longer viable.
Amna Akbar interviews Joe Soss and Joshua Page about how the criminal legal system extracts resources from the nation’s most oppressed communities and converts them into public and private revenues.
As we work toward a durable democratic future, a commitment to legislative primacy can serve as an orienting north star. Reaching that goal, however, will require using both legislative and executive tools, especially while we are working with an imperfect, hobbled, and significantly co-opted legislature.
As New York’s Rent Guidelines Board weighs a possible rent freeze, the real significance of its annual hearings lies beyond the final vote. These public proceedings serve as a crucial engine for tenant organizing, building the collective power needed to overcome the real estate industry’s next wave of opposition.
Corporate diversity practices, long celebrated for driving revenue growth and stabilizing stock prices, are now being targeted as liabilities by conservative shareholder activists, consumer boycotts, and litigation. This shift from rainbow capitalism to today’s anti-woke agenda reveals how diversity’s value in the marketplace has always been politically and legally constructed.
