A collection of our most illuminating posts on administrative law and democratic governance, featuring Sabeel Rahman, Karen Tani, Sophia Z. Lee, Kate Jackson, Daniel Walters, Blake Emerson, and more.
In the midst of the chaos, an ambitious policy agenda beckons. Elizabeth Wilkins, Chiraag Bains, Bharat Ramamurti, Samuel Bagenstos, Shilpa Phadke, and K. Sabeel Rahman reflect on how to rebuild, rather than merely reproduce, what came before the wreckage.
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.
If the recent past is no longer a useful guide to seeking change in the present, what good is policy-adjacent scholarship?
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.
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.
According to a common antimonopoly narrative, prior to the merger wave of the 1980s, antitrust enforcement kept the meatpacking industry competitive and relatively decentralized — a situation that enhanced farmers’ autonomy and bargaining power. Yet a closer look at the historical record reveals that this fierce midcentury competition also undermined the unionized labor force and New-Deal regulatory regimes that previously dispersed power. Correcting this narrative should encourage antimonopolists not to become too starry-eyed about “competition” as a market regulator.
New research reveals that more than two-thirds of U.S. workers are subject to electronic monitoring, and that more intensive productivity monitoring is associated with higher levels of anxiety, needing to work at unsafe speeds, and a higher likelihood of serious injury.
In the wake of their recent defeat, Democrats’ natural tendency will be to concede the issue of immigration to Republicans and embrace cruelty-lite versions of their opponents’ positions — a strategy that is bound to fail. Instead, Democrats need to offer their own agenda for immigration and internal migration. To do so, they should look to institutional experiments from a forgotten past.
Though the urban-rural divide can sometimes appear like a primordial fault line in American political life, it is a relatively recent development. The Democratic Party’s collapse in the countryside was the predictable consequence of decisions to prioritize certain constituencies to the neglect of others, as it championed the shift to the metropolitan knowledge economy.
The articles, blogs, exit polls, charts, tweets, and skeets that have been helping us make sense of the 2024 election.
Faced with increasingly dire housing challenges, tenants and organizers have called on federal administrative agencies to impose rent regulations, curb discriminatory screening practices, and limit the grounds for eviction. But will such regulations survive in a post-Chevron world? And, if not, might they nevertheless serve long-term fair housing goals?
Recent years have witnessed a sea change in consumer protection, ushered in by a new generation of enforcers who reject many of the basic premises from the neoliberal era. They aim not merely to ensure that consumers have the information necessary to discipline firms through choice, but to prevent businesses from using their power to shape markets in ways that take advantage of consumers.
How the encroachment of private capital into the broadband ecosystem threatens local provision and the goal of universal, affordable broadband.
