Skip to content
LPE Originals

Agencies Outflanked

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.

LPE Originals

Outrage and Resistance: Abolitionist Lessons for the Present Crisis

The Trump Administration’s open rejection of due process and equal protection echoes some of the darkest aspects of antebellum America, when black Americans were frequently kidnapped and disappeared into the South without recourse. Yet this history also shows that direct legal representation can play a powerful role in mobilizing public opposition to unjust policies and proceedings.

LPE Originals

The New Carceral Public Health Law

According to recent judicial decisions, the state can criminalize homelessness, ban abortion, and restrict gender-affirming care, all in the name of public health, yet it cannot mandate vaccines nor pause evictions. How should we understand this asymmetry, and how might we realign public health jurisprudence with the pursuit of equality?

LPE Originals

America’s First Religious Public School?

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.

LPE Originals

The TikTok Ban and the Limits of the First Amendment

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.

LPE Originals

Transnational Law as a Battle of Position

American courts exercise authority beyond U.S. borders, including over foreign governments, all the time. To most observers, this is simply a consequence of increasing economic globalization and legal modernization, which untethered jurisdiction from territory. But this is a mistake. Law has not become divorced from territory but instead actively remapped it; it has not merely responded to globalization, but actively produced it.

LPE Originals

After Chevron: Political Economy and the Future of the Administrative State

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?

LPE Originals

The Judiciary, Self-Governance, and the Rule of Law

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.

LPE Originals

Who Says Evictions Should Be Efficient?

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?

LPE Originals

Procedure, Inequality, and Access

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.