Over the past fifty years, corporate advocates have co-opted the language and tactics of modern social movements to graft identity-based attributes onto the corporate entity. These new, personalized dimensions are deployed to weaken corporate regulations and, unlike more traditional forms of lobbying, endure beyond any single campaign. Taken together, they represent a reinvention of the modern corporation.
Waived overnight in response to a crisis for capital but maintained in the face of protest from former and current territories, the Jones Act has a colonial logic that is impossible to ignore. Yet recent constitutional challenges have done precisely that, refusing to acknowledge the Act’s imperial origins and on-going economic harms.
Beau Baumann’s case for legislative supremacy offers a compelling vision for the left. However, branding it as a form of “constitutional politics” risks obscuring its deeper claim: that nothing, not even the Constitution, should stand above democratic lawmaking. His vision will also face significant opposition from liberals and progressives, many of whom remain tempted by courts and presidential power.
If we are to realize the dream of post-Trump reconstruction, policy reform will not be enough. We must articulate a constitutional politics capable of dismantling both juristocracy and the modern managerial presidency.
How might we recover a pro-labor vision of the Constitution, and what would such a vision look like today? Kate Andrias, Willy Forbath, Jennifer Abruzzo, Keith R. Bolek, Andrea Hoeschen, Darin Dalmat, and Alvin Velazquez share their perspectives.
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.
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.
In the current moment, it is not a crisis of capitalism that challenges democracy, but its triumph. For this reason, our political-economic situation is quite different from that of Weimar Germany, whatever continuities and similarities may exist.
In the ruins of the administrative state after Trump, many on the left see an opportunity to design a New Deal-type reconstruction agenda. But building state capacity requires a government that is seen as legitimate, and it is precisely the erosion of legitimacy in the eyes of the public that has enabled Trump to carry out his deconstructive agenda.
The Supreme Court’s NIH v. APHA decision creates a harmful “two-track” litigation process, forcing plaintiffs to file duplicative lawsuits in different courts to obtain relief. Echoing the Pennhurst ruling of 50 years ago, the Court’s procedural maneuvering threatens to obstruct justice for those challenging discriminatory government actions.
By misstating the holding of SFFA in a recent dear colleague letter, the Department of Education has created a gap between what the law requires and the agency’s interpretation of the law. This gap, in addition to inviting anticipatory overcompliance, risks giving rise to inconsistent policies at different colleges and universities.
Four Supreme Court decisions concerning the power of the administrative state have left agencies increasingly vulnerable to attack. Each decision is significant on its own, but together they underscore the precarious position of agency action today.
Many unitary executive proponents argue that federal labor rights undermine presidential power. This position is simplistic and short-sighted: labor rights offer the executive a different, more valuable form of power – expanded state capacity – that is necessary for modern presidents to deliver on their political priorities. And they so do in a manner that is more democratically accountable than any of the likely alternatives.
Trump’s recent attacks on the judiciary are best understood as an effort to lay the groundwork for a gradual shift in public opinion — to normalize the idea that defying court orders is not only acceptable but maybe even expected among his base.
