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LPE Originals

The Dark Doppelganger of Affordable Higher Education

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In the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, the Trump administration included a brilliant bit of faux-populism: a five-year tuition freeze. The proposal creates the illusion that the right is taking decisive action to address affordability, while obfuscating its larger plan to abandon higher education as a public good. To prevent MAGA from outflanking and corrupting a popular left position, we must embrace ambitious solutions that will actually address the high cost of attending college.
LPE Originals

From Movement Lawyering to Prefigurative Lawyering: Living Out Liberatory Values Now

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As the far right consolidates power at the federal level, many progressive lawyers are turning to state policy or crafting rebuilding plans for after the storm. Yet this moment also offers a chance to adopt a more radical orientation: prefigurative lawyering at the local level. According to this approach, we must create the world we want to live in now, working with movement partners in the co-creation of non-capitalist ecosystems based on care and cooperation.
LPE Originals

Can DEI Workers Strike Back?

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Even as the Trump administration seeks to dismantle DEI in the name of “merit,” the law it distorts still harbors possibilities for resistance. Title VII prohibits retaliation against employees who oppose discrimination, and workers purged for their past DEI efforts should consider pursuing retaliation claims against their employers. Such lawsuits would raise the costs of anticipatory capitulation, while also providing some measure of relief to workers already harmed.
LPE Originals

Movement Law Under Fascism

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As fascist tendencies intensify across the United States, social movements continue to organize against the forces of state repression. Legal scholars must stand with these movements, grounding our analysis in struggle and supporting those fighting on the frontlines with our relative social power and institutional resources.
LPE Originals

The Rising Threat of Antisemitism Investigations

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In the fall of 2023, the Department of Education launched more antisemitism investigations into colleges and universities than in all previous years combined. This record was surpassed in 2024 and is on track to be broken again in 2025. While the Biden administration wielded these investigations as a cudgel to crush student-led protests in support of Palestine, Trump has turned them into a battering ram in his attempt to remake American higher education.
LPE Originals

How Conspiracy Law Threatens Social Movements

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Following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, President Trump and his allies have repeatedly threatened to use conspiracy laws against liberal groups, protesters, and political opponents. These threats reflect a troubling trend: prosecutors are exploiting the vague and expansive nature of conspiracy charges to attack the very relationships and forms of coordination that make social movements possible.
LPE Originals

Why Not a Faculty Union?

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Despite a recent surge in campus organizing, tenured faculty at private universities haven’t unionized. Why is this? The conventional answer is that the Supreme Court said they can’t. Fortunately, the conventional answer is wrong.
LPE Originals

Beyond The Ballot: Building The Movement Democrats Won’t

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The MAGA movement has preyed on the economic decay and social malaise plaguing America’s neighborhoods, offering a suite of real and imagined villains to drive Trump’s ascension. The left must get back to basics, rebuilding the trust lost by the Democratic Party through genuine community building and connection across difference.
LPE Originals

Outrage and Resistance: Abolitionist Lessons for the Present Crisis

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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

When It Comes to Free Speech, Dark Money Often Speaks Louder Than Words

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In September 2024, an anonymous donor gifted $100 million to the University of Chicago to promote free speech. A closer look at dark money’s role in manufacturing campus free speech crises reminds us to be highly skeptical of understandings of campus speech funded by elite interests, especially when they replace institutional deliberation with a legalistic absolutism that leaves hierarchies of wealth and power unchallenged.
LPE Originals

Labor Organizing In a Time of Legal Chaos

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Amid growing federal attacks, public sector workers can’t count on the courts for protection. Instead, they should take inspiration from the trade unionists who organized before the passage of the National Labor Relations Act.