The current constitutional crisis offers a new picture of what legitimate government looks like: rule by the boss, where professional civil servants become at-will employees, the threat of prosecution is just another bargaining chip, and statutory, constitutional, and ethical restraints are treated as tokens in a sucker’s game.
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.
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?
When it’s time to rebuild from the wreckage of the Trump-Musk rampage, the left may have the opportunity to implement a truly transformative agenda. However, unless we have relatively detailed proposals ready in advance, we will lose out to those who merely want to reproduce what came before.
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?
Trumpist unity is largely a fiction conjured by the Democratic Party in a naïve attempt at “defending democracy.” A robust opposition must seek and target wedges within the Trump coalition, pitting conservatism’s component parts against one another.
An increasing number of universities want to restrict their leaders from speaking about issues of public concern. This push for “neutrality” is a key piece of a broader conservative campaign to suppress speech that conservatives don’t like. It also offers a lesson about what we can expect of powerful institutions in the second Trump era.
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.
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.
With Elon Musk plowing his wealth into a pro-Trump super PAC and Jeff Bezos blocking the Washington Post’s endorsement of Harris, it’s easy to overlook the more direct anti-democratic power of the entrepreneurial elite. Their economic power — the ability to shape the future of our society in utterly unaccountable ways — requires no insidious corruption of democratic procedures or public officials. The entrepreneur rules us without ruling through politics.
The LPE Blog goes worldwide, bringing you some of our favorite global LPE and LPE-adjacent scholarship from 2024.
Butler’s speculative fiction uses the freedom dreams of Black Americans to show how the structure of a political economy not only reflects but also shapes legal concepts. By challenging the perceived permanence of existing power structures, Afrofuturism creates space for envisioning new, emancipatory futures.
A new tendency within American conservatism is borrowing leftwing critiques of the rightwing status quo. What is the Trad Dad Populist and what kind of political economy does he hope to construct?
