The rule of law is inherently fragile, as law’s legitimacy ultimately depends on politics. Yet as demonstrated by the successful referendum in Berlin to expropriate more than 250,000 apartments from corporate landlords, this very dependence can empower democratic mobilization and redirect the conservative nature of the law towards a progressive future.
Boycotts and international sanctions both represent alternative means of lawmaking that challenge the liberal legal order. But while the disruptive potential of boycotts has largely been contained, international sanctions have evaded the constraints of international law. By looking to the social-movement roots of international sanctions, we might be able to imagine an alternative to today’s world of unfettered unilateral economic coercion.
While recent conventional wisdom has held that it is futile to organize voters around debt relief, a longer view reveals that there is nothing inevitable about the lack of debtor mobilization. Through the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, debtors repeatedly demanded protection in times of economic distress — a history that contains important lessons for our present moment.
While scholars have recently highlighted the role of law in democratic backsliding, they have largely ignored the actors who wield this tool: lawyers. Yet as the guardians of the legal legitimacy upon which autocratic legalism depends, the profession is a critical arena of democratic struggle that merits special attention.
The uncompensated work that law students perform to run the field’s journals is best understood as part of an economy of prestige: an opportunity to burnish one’s resume in hopes of landing a lucrative or high-status job after graduation. Among other problems with this arrangement, it leaves American legal scholarship vulnerable to repression. Recently, however, journal workers have begun to organize around the conditions of their labor – an effort that has the potential to transform the landscape of legal publication and, in doing so, contribute to a culture of increased solidarity in law schools themselves.
At both the state and federal level, there are legislative efforts underway to depict students, faculty, and the university itself as potential enemies of the U.S. national security state that must be disciplined and controlled. If enacted, these laws will upend how universities function, who they welcome, and how they teach their students.
Municipal liability insurers have often unrecognized incentives to discourage reforms aimed at reducing police misconduct. For insurers, the predictability of losses is more important than the level of losses. This means that they are likely to oppose democratic reforms that create uncertainty and make it difficult to price the risks of police misconduct.
Presented with a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, corporations and right-wing trade associations have launched a series of constitutional challenges to worker rights. In response, workers are putting forward a fundamentally different vision for our economy and society — an alternative not only to business’s right-wing constitution but also to the New Deal constitutional settlement.
Crisis can be clarifying. Recent events on campuses across the country have forced many of us to look more closely at how our own universities work, including at the decades-long drift toward more powerful university presidents. Reversing this drift, and developing a more democratic model of internal governance, may be a prerequisite not only for rebuilding intellectual community but also for avoiding future campus conflagrations.
Law students at Columbia, CUNY, NYU, and Yale explain the demands behind the ongoing anti-war protests and offer their reflections from the encampments.
An interview with Vincent Bevins on what we can learn from the failed protests of the previous decade.
Aziz Rana aims to free us from Constitution worship. An abiding faith in “redemptive” constitutionalism, his new book argues, has long held back liberals, progressives, and even the Left from seriously promoting major change in our structures of government. Yet key left figures and movements have always made canny use of redemptive constitutional narratives and arguments. Rejecting that tradition leaves far too much on the table.
Given the manifest flaws of the U.S. Constitution, how did Americans come to idolize this document? Aziz Rana kicks off a symposium on his new book, The Constitutional Bind, by reflecting on the path that led to our current political predicament, and how long-buried Left thinking about state and economy might help us find our way out of it.
That public defense is in a state of crisis is far from controversial. Crushing caseloads and rampant underfunding have created untenable working conditions under which even the most well-meaning defenders often struggle to effectively represent their clients. And yet, Jocelyn Simonson, in her important new book Radical Acts of Justice, identifies a deeper, more existential crisis facing public defense — not one of funding, but of purpose.
The activists depicted in Radical Acts of Justice challenge the idea that criminal prosecutors represent “the People.” But where did that idea come from in the first place? By tracing the long shift in American history from informal, non-professional law enforcement to our current system of formal, bureaucratized law enforcement, we can better understand the terrain on which contemporary popular justice movements are waging their struggles.
