The old school year is dying, and the new one struggles to be born: now is the time of movies.
The marginalization of international law under the second Trump administration has been a shock to the post-Cold War world order. Yet the impact of this development on the global economy has been far from uniform. Some of the most important sectors to trade — including telecommunications and civil aviation — were already governed primarily through informal, political arrangements.
For much of the past century, international lawyers have sought to drive a wedge between “economic” matters and the use of military force. Recent events in the Caribbean and the Strait of Hormuz suggest that wedge is no longer viable.
The overt gangsterfication of US foreign policy, formalized through the so-called “Board of Peace,” marks the culmination of a dangerous transformation in the nature of American hegemony.
The United States’ turn toward naked coercion and transactional deal-making represents both a genuine departure from its commitment to the liberal international legal order and the culmination of that order’s internal contradictions.
Amna Akbar interviews Joe Soss and Joshua Page about how the criminal legal system extracts resources from the nation’s most oppressed communities and converts them into public and private revenues.
Corporate diversity practices, long celebrated for driving revenue growth and stabilizing stock prices, are now being targeted as liabilities by conservative shareholder activists, consumer boycotts, and litigation. This shift from rainbow capitalism to today’s anti-woke agenda reveals how diversity’s value in the marketplace has always been politically and legally constructed.
At the core of the U.S. banking system is the public’s choice to delegate money-creation privileges to private actors. But what is the public getting in exchange? An ever-swelling suite of predatory credit products and few basic services. It’s time to reset the terms of the bargain.
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.
Unable to realize enough profit from their portfolios to repay their investors, landlords are turning the screws on tenants in the form of rising rents and declining conditions. Understanding this financial distress points us beyond questions of supply to a more nuanced analysis of the political economy of rental housing, revealing the market interventions needed to unlock tenant power.
In Argentina’s recent debt renegotiations with the IMF, the overriding goal has been to ensure the government can meet all future payment obligations. Yet the conditions imposed to achieve this aim have deepened a crisis of social reproduction, rendering life itself unsustainable.
Weeks after pardoning former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández for drug trafficking, Donald Trump ordered U.S. forces to seize Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro on the same charges. How should we make sense of these seemingly contradictory actions? And what do they tell us about the true purpose of the War on Drugs?
Many on the left continue to view cryptocurrency as little more than a grift. Yet the crypto industry aims to achieve something much more dangerous: functional monetary sovereignty. Their infrastructures create new conditions for exchange, wealth, and information. By ignoring these developments, we increasingly live in a dystopian world of monetary fiefdoms, and we find ourselves lacking the legal imagination to meet the moment.
Amid the chaos of the second Trump administration, it is easy to lose sight of a simple, terrifying fact: the American president’s personal wealth is now inextricably linked to the viability of cryptocurrency.
From legislative paralysis to regulatory fragmentation to strategic incoherence, Democrats have spent the past five years squandering opportunities to assert control over the future of digital currencies. To reverse course, progressives need to embrace a coordinated approach that balances innovation, privacy, and systemic risk.
