The customary case caption in criminal court, “The People v. Defendant,” pits the community against one lone person in an act of collective condemnation. When I was a public defender in New York City, it was common for judges, clerks, and other courtroom players to refer to individual Assistant District Attorneys as “the People,” as…
Ruth Wilson Gilmore has written that “we are faced with the ascendance of anti-state state actors: people and parties who gain state power by denouncing state power.” This tendency surfaced in the wake of the economic and legitimacy crisis of liberal capitalism in the 1970s, and has gained strength in the decades since, taking hold…
My earlier post on for-profit colleges discussed a special instance the limits that a neoliberal lens places on a progressive vision for higher education. In this post I discuss the more general phenomenon and an alternative approach to thinking about higher education. In doing so, I draw from a nascent project that Frank Pasquale and…
Betsy Devos’s Department of Education spent the summer finalizing its plans to defang Obama-era regulations strengthening consumer protection regulations of for-profit colleges. Undoing these regulations will keep federal funds flowing to companies that line investors’ pockets by imposing a lifetime of indebtedness onto working-class individuals under false pretenses. The ongoing challenges to their delay and…
Introduction: From ‘Accounting For’ to ‘Accountable To’ In an earlier post I welcomed legislation recently proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren. Her Accountable Capitalism Act, I suggested, not only bids fair in the long run to render incorporated business firms less sociopathic, but also affords in the short run a fine opportunity to recall what…
Last month Senator Elizabeth Warren proposed an innovative – or better yet, restorative – new piece of legislation to the US Senate. Something like the Senator’s Accountable Capitalism Act, which would, among other things, hold corporations accountable to other stakeholders besides shareholders, is long overdue. It is in consequence much more than welcome. This owes…
This week, I published two pieces about economic power. One, an op-ed in the New York Times, distilled some major themes from the Supreme Court’s neoliberal jurisprudence: allowing private power to colonize public law (arbitration), using constitutional rights to protect economic power (First Amendment restrictions on union dues and campaign finance), and deploying federalism doctrine…
New York City recently became the first jurisdiction in the United States to guarantee a right to counsel for poor people at risk of eviction. This was an important step in the fight for equal access to the courts, and a significant victory for tenant advocates who had waged a decades-long campaign to ensure fairness…
Like many of you, we’ve been moved by the voices of the student activists from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. With fierce focus and astonishing political savvy, they’ve unleashed an urgent new national debate about gun control. America today has the highest per capita gun ownership in the world, and evidence suggests that this is…
In her fascinating new book Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks recounts that the first “big data” set in the United States “was the Eugenics Records Office in Cold Spring Harbor. It was the public arm of the eugenics movement.” While the systematic collection of data has underpinned many important initiatives, it also has a dark side.…
How should we understand the crisis of the current moment? Is the election of President Trump a temporary aberration or does it reflect deeper political trends—both in the United States and elsewhere? In a recently published essay in American Affairs, I argue that the defining features of Trump’s agenda did not come out of nowhere. What…
More than a year after the 2016 election, progressive analysis and strategy continue to be limited by the ping and pong of class-not-race and race-not-class accounts, and recriminations they provoke. Understanding what happened and charting a way forward require an alternative, a thoroughly intersectional analysis of race and class. On such a view, taking race…
Neoliberalism is an indispensable term for making sense of the legal, political, and ideological conflicts of the moment, and also one of the most maligned. Liberals who feel criticized by it have insisted so often and so loudly on its uselessness that even those on the left who use it often seem compelled to apologize…
Why focus on what we call law and political economy, and why now? In the last decade, inequality has become impossible to ignore. The 2008 financial crisis and the foreclosures and dislocation that followed it shook public and (to a limited extent) elite confidence that financial markets would “police” themselves and work for everyone. The…
This is a time of crises. Inequality is accelerating, with gains concentrated at the top of the income and wealth distributions. This trend – interacting with deep racialized and gendered injustice – has had profound implications for our politics, and for the sense of agency, opportunity, and security of all but the narrowest sliver of…
