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LPE Originals

Toward a Democratic Political Economy for the First Amendment

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The key to understanding the connection between rights and material conditions is a conception of democracy…. people who are suffering from certain basic forms of deprivation and disadvantage will find it impossible to exercise fundamental rights and they will be unable to participate meaningfully in the project of cooperative government. Liberties may become impossible to realize without sufficient primary goods, while membership status within the political community may be degraded by structural inequality of economic wherewithal. Such problems can be avoided, at least partially, if freedom of speech and religion are construed in ways that are sensitive to the material conditions for their meaningful exercise. Otherwise, the conditions for the cooperative project of self-government will be absent.
LPE Originals

Countering the Neoliberal Structural Constitution

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This post is part of our symposium on socialist constitutionalism. The Federalist Society leverages right-wing legal change by promoting constitutional originalism as a seemingly noble and neutral foundation for neoliberal political economy.  Without a comparably accessible and compelling contrary first principle, left and centrist law and politics can appear to be a diffuse agenda of contested…
LPE Originals

Policing as Unequal Protection

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Black Americans have endured police violence since the nation’s founding. The origins of American policing have been traced to slave patrols. Today, Blacks are more likely than whites to encounter police, to be stopped by police, and to be fatally wounded by police. In recognition of this history and ongoing experience of violence, the Movement for Black Lives (“M4BL”) has called for the defunding of the police; community control of policing; and the development of nonpunitive, noncarceral institutions for resolving social conflict, among other transformative changes.
LPE Originals

Last Week’s Surprisingly Deep Victory for LGBT Workers

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This post was originally published at Jacobin. Last Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity is prohibited by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The decision brings employment law in line with public opinion: a majority of Americans favor employment protections for LGBT…
LPE Originals

The Constitution of Social Progress

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Constitutionalism sits at the commanding heights of law. That framework of governing structures, rights, and ideals shouldn’t be abandoned to right-wing and liberal-centrist construction. Socialists and progressives instead ought to embrace a constitutional vision in which legislative and executive power give effect to the spirit of democratic equality that underlies but outruns the Constitution’s text.
LPE Originals

Socialism Past and Future – or Socialism is Past, and the Future?

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In Forbath’s telling, Weimar is not a cautionary tale but an opportunity for a do over. There’s much to like, and learn, from rekindling this vision of social democracy. In what follows, I invite other characters to this story, drawing from Mexico’s constitutional history, and raise a few questions about the limits of the social democratic bequest as a compass for our imagination.
LPE Originals

The Relevance of Weimar

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Willy Forbath’s return to the Weimar Constitution is inspiring. I will just point out of a couple of limits to turning back to it in the present — limits that strike me as difficult to overcome.
LPE Originals

Socialism Past and Future (Part II of II)

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In my last post, I began a discussion of the Weimar Constitution as one of the first constitutions containing provisions for social and economic rights (SER), and perhaps the very first one, in which socialists had an important hand drafting and expounding. The literature on constitutional SER misses a great deal when it casts the Weimar Constitution as a weak, infant version of later SER constitutions, which grew stronger over time.
LPE Originals

Progressive Democracy and Legislative Form

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Adrian Vermeule recently made a stir with his proposal for a “common-good constitutionalism.” He argued that originalism had “outlived its utility” now that the right had gained power on the federal bench. Instead it was time for a “substantively conservative approach to constitutional law and interpretation.” We got only a few peaks at the substance,…
LPE Originals

The Constitutional Role of Economic Coordination Rights

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There’s a common notion that pervades legal and policy debate—including among fairly liberal Democrats—that collective bargaining mechanisms, and even public coordination of markets through minimum wages and working conditions, distort market outcomes and are therefore inefficient (though they may be justified by countervailing considerations). This position immediately sets up a kind of presumption against labor…