The struggle over Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination for the US Supreme Court and the subsequent horrible spectacle of the Senate hearings brought about a “genuine question” by a leading economist, Dani Rodrik: “how do we prevent ‘the Supreme Court has always been political’ argument from morphing into ‘judicial independence and the rule of law are political…
Judge Brett Kavanaugh, now very close to controlling the decisive vote on the Supreme Court, resembles other candidates for high political office. He has a constituency–the Federalist Society, anti-abortion activists, everyone who hopes to see Obamacare weakened and affirmative action ended–and other constituencies in opposition. Lots of money is being raised and spent for and…
The concept of economic competition is central to policymaking deliberation in this country. Yet even as our understanding of that concept evolves to take better account of corporate power, our thinking about competition retains a fundamental blind spot. Simply, the boundaries of the business firm insulate many instances of economic coordination that would be deemed anti-competitive…
Legal advocates have scored some major class-related victories in 2018. In January, an appellate court held that the administration of California’s money bail system violated the Fourteenth Amendment rights of indigent defendants. In February, the Fifth Circuit held Harris County’s money bail procedures unconstitutional on the ground that they keep the “poor arrestee” behind bars…
A durable progressive antitrust must invert the prevailing ideology and permit cooperation among workers (and the powerless in general) and condemn the consolidation and monopolization of capital
The concept of ultrahazardous activities, the creation of no-fault workers’ compensation and motor vehicle insurance, and the rise of mass tort litigation can all be partially traced to underlying technological changes and accompanying social shifts. In this post, I will use prior tort law revolutions as a springboard to discuss how new products liability law and fiduciary duties could be used to rectify this new power imbalance and ensure that IoT companies are held accountable for the harms they foreseeably cause.
Once upon a time, missing a payment on your leased car would be the first of a multi-step negotiation between you and a car dealership, bounded by contract law and consumer protection rules, mediated and ultimately enforced by the government. You might have to pay a late fee, or negotiate a loan deferment, but usually a company would not repossess your car until after two or even three consecutive skipped payments. Today, however, car companies are using starter interrupt devices to remotely “boot” cars just days after a payment is missed. In this post I’ll elaborate on how IoT devices empower companies at the expense of consumers and how extant law shields industry from liability.
Companies around the world are dreaming up a new generation of technologies designed to monitor their workers—from Amazon’s new employee wristbands, to Uber’s recording whether its drivers are holding their phones rather than mounting them. Technologies like these can erode workplace privacy and encourage discrimination. Without disregarding the importance of those effects, I want to focus in this post on how employers can use new monitoring technologies to drive down wages or otherwise disempower workers as a class.
I read Moyn’s book as a break from my work as a judge in a human rights court. It was a treat, deliciously U.S.-centric, in spite of the author’s effort in mentioning “the rest of the world” so obviously excluded from the “we” which sometimes appears.
If the First Gilded Age is the age of industrial capitalism, the Second Gilded Age is the age of digital or informational capitalism. Like the First Gilded Age, it is also a time of deep political corruption and despair about the future of American democracy. It has not yet produced a second Progressive Era, yet every day I see signs that this is where we are headed.
On May 30, 2018 the Illinois legislature voted to ratify the ERA. Thirty-seven states have now ratified the sex equality amendment to the U.S. Constitution, just one state shy of the three-quarters required by Article V to validly amend the Constitution. Legal commentary following this news is primarily focused on questions about the amendment’s legitimacy,…
Not Enough offers important insights into some of the failures of the existing human rights movement, at least in its mainstream form. Drawing on these, as well as my own experience with the access to medicines movement, I’ll offer a few thoughts on the shape of a human rights yet to come.
Recently on this blog, Sabeel Rahman and Ganesh Sitaraman detailed the growing interest among public law scholars in questions of power, inequality, and political economy. One feature of the emerging scholarship, they correctly note, is that it directs its attention not primarily to courts, but to legislators and social movements; it focuses not primarily on…
There’s yet one more way I try to get students to see the mutually entangled systems of capitalism and racism presented by Fant v. Ferguson. Why did Ferguson and other northern St Louis suburbs end up depending on their criminal justice systems for the revenues necessary to run a city?
A third vantage point from which to consider Fant v Ferguson is legal geography: the way that racism and capitalism over time shape create and maintain physical spaces through processes of investment and disinvestment, development and underdevelopment, displacement and settlement. A key way into this story – as Audrey MacFarlane notes – is through the history of racial segregation in housing markets.
