The Supreme Court’s recent administrative law decisions represent a fundamental shift in both political and economic power. In response, we must not settle for simply restoring the status quo ante. Instead, the task for an LPE approach to the administrative state requires answering a more foundational question: what would effective, equitable, and democratic governance look like?
Earlier this year, in an effort to limit judge-shopping, the Judicial Conference adopted a policy requiring judges to be assigned through a district-wide random selection process. The rejection of this policy by judges in the Northern District of Texas is one sign among many that the judiciary is unfit to regulate itself.
Shahd Hammouri on the state duty not to facilitate the transit of weapons to Israel, Helen Hershkoff, Luke Norris, and Judith Resnik on LPE & Civil Procedure, and Kathryn Sabbeth on the one-sided concern for efficiency in eviction court. Plus, an upcoming student info session with Amy Kapczynski and Corinne Blalock on everything you always wanted to know about LPE (but were too afraid to ask). And, as always, the best of LPE from around the web, including new pieces by Veena Dubal, Sandeep Vaheesan, Jake Grumbach, Lev Menand & Morgan Ricks, and Victor Pickard!
Eviction courts are ruthlessly efficient, with the average trial lasting less than two minutes. Yet this speed comes at the expense of tenants’ due process and other rights, while its benefits primarily accrue to landlords. When civil justice reform is taken up in the name of efficiency, eviction courts challenge us to ask: what, or whom, does efficiency sacrifice?
Civil procedure is political economy all the way down. Helen Hershkoff, Luke Norris, and Judith Resnik kick off a symposium on the subject by describing the promise of procedure to further equal treatment and accountable decision-making, as well as how such aspirations are undercut by resource disparities and efforts to replace the use of courts with private arbitration.
Religious liberty challenges to the Affordable Care Act often appear narrowly focused on exempting specific employers from covering particular types of care, such as contraceptives, sterilization, or gender-affirming care. However, closer examination reveals that such claims should be understood as a major new vector in the campaign against social insurance in the United States.
In the aftermath of Dobbs, EU institutions and leaders have started to mobilize to defend reproductive freedom. However, the EU’s current approach to abortion access – which regulates it through economic and human rights frameworks – not only contributes to a stratified system of care, but also risks privatizing and depoliticizing the issue.
Boycotts and international sanctions both represent alternative means of lawmaking that challenge the liberal legal order. But while the disruptive potential of boycotts has largely been contained, international sanctions have evaded the constraints of international law. By looking to the social-movement roots of international sanctions, we might be able to imagine an alternative to today’s world of unfettered unilateral economic coercion.
The most common argument in favor of electronic monitoring in the criminal and immigration systems is that, even with its drawbacks and punitive features, monitoring is better than incarceration. While sometimes appropriate, this rationale is frequently deployed in problematic ways — on the basis of faulty reasoning and to the detriment of those whom it purportedly benefits.
While recent conventional wisdom has held that it is futile to organize voters around debt relief, a longer view reveals that there is nothing inevitable about the lack of debtor mobilization. Through the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, debtors repeatedly demanded protection in times of economic distress — a history that contains important lessons for our present moment.
Traditional interpretations of the Genocide Convention construe the crime of genocide in notoriously limited terms. By contrast, South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ represents an effort to construct a historically-grounded and political economy-informed understanding of genocidal violence.
Tal Rothstein on collective organizing at the law reviews, and Scott Cummings on the role of lawyers in democratic backsliding. Plus, a new open-access book on radically legal politics, a piece on the history of racist plunder through local tax codes, and a forum on dethroning fossil capital.
While scholars have recently highlighted the role of law in democratic backsliding, they have largely ignored the actors who wield this tool: lawyers. Yet as the guardians of the legal legitimacy upon which autocratic legalism depends, the profession is a critical arena of democratic struggle that merits special attention.
Ethan Ris on why you should ignore the Ivy League, Greta Krippner on the puzzling persistence of gender discrimination in insurance markets, and Grace Li on the role of associative life in prisons. Plus, the final session in our series on What To Do About the Courts, a cool job at the Roosevelt Institute, a new series on Twail and economic sanctions, a hot new piece on presidential administration, and a rebuttal to the idea that abandoning the consumer welfare standard means abandoning consumers.
Even though gender classifications have been eliminated from most market domains, they stubbornly persist in the insurance context. To understand this puzzling persistence, we must examine the traditions of mutualism that have shaped insurance as a social institution, and how these traditions embed gender in the tools used to price risk.
