Legal and Political Theory – LPE Project

Anti-Domination and the Future of Progressive Administration

James Brandt — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Our governing institutions are undergoing a dramatic and dangerous transformation. The Trump Administration, aided by its allies in Congress and the Judiciary, is seeking to tear down and remake our basic institutions in a more authoritarian mode. One central task of the current moment is to slow and stop this transformation. Yet as Luke Herrine observed in these pages earlier this spring...

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State Capitalist Mutations Under Trump 2.0

Chloe Miller — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Global capitalism is undergoing turbulent mutations, including the seemingly unstoppable rise of Big Tech and the aggressive reengineering of globalization to intensifying geopolitical rivalries. The supercharged business and political news cycle is moving at an ever more dizzying pace. In this context, many of us are seeking intellectual resources to help us understand the specificity and...

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The Anti-Democratic Legal Form of the University (and How To Fix It)

James Brandt — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 11:00:00 +0000

In a 2021 report titled Covid-19 and Academic Governance, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) detailed egregious violations of “shared governance” at eight institutions of higher education. These included the termination of tenured as well as nontenured appointments, the suspension of faculty handbooks, the elimination of entire academic programs, the abolition of established...

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From the Vault: LPE & Administrative Law

James Brandt — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 11:00:00 +0000

This post is part of a series highlighting some of our favorite entries from the archives. Read the rest of the posts here. *** The American administrative state is in crisis. In recent years, the Supreme Court has dismantled core doctrines of administrative law; in recent weeks, President Trump and his henchmen have attempted to implement radical measures to reshape the executive branch.

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The Political Economy of the Current Crisis

James Brandt — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 11:00:00 +0000

On Monday, I argued that what the rule of law entails, especially for official actions, is part of a package of political morality and constitutional practice, and so it is quite right to link concerns about the rule of law with the sense that a constitutional crisis is afoot. A constitutional crisis, however, is not necessarily apocalyptic, even it feels that way from within the regime under...

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On Constitutional Crisis, the Rule of Law, and the Fate of Democracy

James Brandt — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Author’s note: I wrote this post before the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York moved to dismiss its case against Mayor Eric Adams. Although I know nothing of the particulars of that preceding the move to drop it, I agree wholeheartedly with, and cannot improve on, the principle that Assistant U.S. Attorney Hagan Scotten expressed in his resignation letter: “No system...

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How Antipoverty Advocates Can Go On The Offensive

Liz Brown — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 11:00:00 +0000

In the last half of 2024, more than 100 cities “banned people from sleeping outside even if they have nowhere else to go.” The timing was not random. Earlier in the year, the Supreme Court decided, in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, that local governments can criminalize homelessness despite the Eighth Amendment’s bar on cruel and unusual punishment. The Ninth Circuit, in Martin v. Boise...

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On Writing Down Our Dreams During a Living Nightmare

James Brandt — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 11:00:00 +0000

It’s obvious by now that Trump, Musk, and their gaggle of gleeful technofascists are attempting to tear apart the federal government as we know it. Indeed, they are attempting to remake the constitutional order in a more tyrannical image, hoping that their allies in Congress, the federal judiciary, the legal academy, and perhaps state governments will join them. Even if they do not achieve their...

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The Anti-Constitutional Attack on Birthright Citizenship

James Brandt — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Donald Trump’s executive order purporting to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants and temporary visitors is flagrantly unconstitutional. It defies over 120 years of Supreme Court precedent, as well as the clear command of the Fourteenth Amendment’s text. It deserves exactly the kind of dismissive response that it received from District Judge John C. Coughenour...

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In This Brave New World, Does Scholarship Still Matter?

James Brandt — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 11:00:00 +0000

The Trump administration’s first week in office has provided no shortage of reasons to despair about the harm and suffering the next four years will bring. But for many policy-adjacent academics—those of us whose work is aimed at scholars, but motivated by relevance for those engaged in policy and politics—recent political events have also given rise to a deeper feeling of unsettlement.

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