A collection of our most illuminating posts on administrative law and democratic governance, featuring Sabeel Rahman, Karen Tani, Sophia Z. Lee, Kate Jackson, Daniel Walters, Blake Emerson, and more.
In mainstream American discourse, offshore financial centers are generally regarded as transnational dens of iniquity, where wealthy individuals conceal their assets and attempt to evade taxation. Yet in some post-colonial jurisdictions, offshore financial law has also played an important role in promoting economic independence.
What use is the rule of law in assessing the Trump administration’s assertions of executive power? To answer this question, we need to clarify our understanding of its value — and more specifically, how this value relates to democracy and constitutionalism.
Luke Herrine on writing down our dreams during a living nightmare, Allison Tait on the not-so-secret lives of trusts, and Ezra Rosser on how antipoverty advocates can go on the offensive. Plus, an upcoming event with Umut Özsu and Sam Moyn, a new paper by Brian Highsmith, Maya Sen, and Kathy Thelen, a new piece by Marshall Steinbaum about the longstanding Democratic reluctance to declare war on inequality, and an open letter to students of the Third Reconstruction.
In the embers of the Supreme Court’s disastrous Grants Pass decision, a new form of necessity doctrine offers a ray of light. If private property owners’ exclusionary rights are meaningfully threatened, might the political will for ending homelessness and food insecurity finally emerge?
The Trump coalition is no monolith. Daniel Martinez HoSang, Lindsay Owens, David Austin Walsh, Amanda Hollis-Brusky, Todd Tucker, and Dessie Zagorcheva reflect on the possibility of exploiting fissures on the right.
Trump’s executive order is not merely unconstitutional. It is an effort to perpetrate the very evils that abolitionists and Republicans sought to eradicate from our constitutional order.
If the recent past is no longer a useful guide to seeking change in the present, what good is policy-adjacent scholarship?
This past Friday, the Supreme Court granted cert in a case that concerns the first religious charter school in the United States. But this case is not merely about school choice or religious freedom — it also reflects a broader contest over how law structures public responsibility and private power.
The Supreme Court’s unanimous affirmation of the TikTok Ban reveals a dangerous weakness in the First Amendment: its failure to protect against government repression that targets the economic infrastructure of speech, rather than speech itself — precisely the kind of repression that is likely to be a hallmark of the second Trump presidency.
Please join the LPE Project on Thursday, January 30th, from 12:10 to 1:30 PM ET, for a lunch talk with Dean Spade titled Sticking Together in Tough Times. Dean Spade is a Professor at Seattle University School of Law, where he teaches courses in Administrative Law, Poverty Law, Gender and Law, Policing and Imprisonment, Professional…
Is the power wielded by interests groups ultimately good or bad? To answer this question, we need to distinguish ordinary interest groups from super-groups, like the American Medical Association, whose legal empowerment makes them legitimate targets for democratic contestation and provides a principled basis on which to assess their political influence.
Beau Baumann and James Goodwin on the LPE of Congress, Shai Karp on landlords as petty tyrants, and a listicle of our favorite LPE posts on technology. Plus, Tara Raghuveer and Ruthy Gourevitch on tenant unions, Suzanne Kahn on feminist progressive populism, good news from the trenches of the EPA and FTC, Alvin Velazquez on bankrupt cities and federal disaster spending, and new book symposia at Legal Form and the American Political Economy Blog (inside you there are two wolves).
Landlords wield significant power over tenants — including the power to set prices, surveil, neglect, harass, and evict — while legal processes offer little to tenants in terms of protection or means of redress when their rights are violated. Withholding rent in response to mistreatment is one righteous way of resisting such domination.
In recent years, the LPE movement has generated compelling positions on the limits of the courts and the promise of the administrative state. Yet it is striking how little it has had to say about about legislative procedure and politics. By focusing on how power can be durably built in Congress, LPE scholars could help envision democratic alternatives to our current institutional doom spiral.
