The enormities keep coming. The Trump Administration is especially busy in environmental and natural resources law, where the executive branch can get a lot done without Congress. There’s the elimination of the Clean Power Plan, the revival of offshore drilling, withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change, repeal of rules to protect streams from…
Earlier this week, a Politico piece by Eric Posner (Chicago Law) and Glen Weyl (Microsoft Research) started to bounce around in progressive labor and twitter circles. It’s entitled “Sponsor An Immigrant Yourself,” and proposes a new “Visas Between Individuals” program through which, they assert, “native workers rather than corporations” could reap the benefits of liberalized…
Most years, I teach an introductory course on International Trade Law. And every year since I began I’ve included a session on the international financial architecture, on the view that this architecture is intimately bound up with the functioning of the trade regime. I begin the course predictably enough with a series of sessions on…
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.…
“[T]ax policy is…human rights policy.” – Philip Alston, UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights On the eve of December 1, 2017—as members of the United States Senate prepared for a late night of political contestation—Senator Bernie Sanders made the Republican tax bill a human rights issue. Senator Sanders drew attention to UN…
“Either Way the Outlook is Dire, Especially for the Poor.” So concludes a journalist after reviewing a draft report by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the environmental justice and human rights consequences of climate change. The 800-plus page report, which is not yet publicly available, details the effects of a 1.5 degree…
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…
For several years, I have been thinking about the rise of racial justice movements that account for political economy—specifically, those with anti-capitalist commitments. I am thinking of the Movement for Black Lives, and aspects of the immigrant justice movement. These social movements mark the revival of anti-capitalist racial justice politics in the United States in…
A core LPE theme is the construction of markets through political choices institutionalized in law. Those choices create an economy structured by whatever matters politically, including race. My Bailey series has been developing this theme in connection to the criminal regulation of work, in particular the use of criminal punishment to compel work. The more familiar…
In the early weeks of the Trump presidency, Steve Bannon declared that one of its principal tasks would be the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Though Bannon has since left the White House, this project has so far proved one of its most enduring preoccupations. Administrative bodies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, Departments of Health…
“In our current moment, anticapitalism and struggles against state violence and incarceration tend to be separate movements.” So wrote renowned historian Robin D.G. Kelley recently in a new preface to his classic book Hammer and Hoe, which examines the largely Black Communists of early-mid 20th century Alabama. Kelley’s protagonists, in contrast, saw struggles against economic inequality…
Are prices the sort of thing that can be fair or unfair? It seems to be common to assume so. Health care is said to cost too much, unhealthy foodstuffs to cost too little. Air and water, we say, should be free. Maybe college and health insurance should be as well? Yet while we frequently…
What would it mean to make economic and political life more democratic? One way toward an answer is by getting more precise about how they are now undemocratic. Avoidance of democracy runs very deep in American law, and perhaps in the modern legal and political order generally. This is so despite the fact that constitutionalism…
This post picks up where Angela Harris and Noah Zatz left off in the conversation about race and class. The arguments in this post preview arguments I will be making in a new book, entitled “The New Majority.” It will surprise no one that I decided to write the book in November of 2016. So…
How will new advanced information technologies impact work? This is a major focus of public debate right now, driven by widespread fears that automation will soon leave tens of millions unemployed. But debate so far has tended to neglect the relationship among technological innovation, political economy, and the law of work. This is a major…
