Law and Justice

Economic Policy with a Mission

Final response: Missions concern far more than scientific and industrial development. They are ultimately about public value creation.

Against Economic Nationalism

A crucial element is missing in recent calls to revive industrial policy: a robust internationalist vision for restructuring the global economy.

What About Workers?

Without centering labor in industrial policy, both the economics and politics will fail.

A Flight Plan That Fails

While this call for moonshots is stirring, it ultimately says too little about how to turn this vision into reality.

Back Down to Earth

The “moonshots” proposed could not be accomplished without a transformation of politics as we know it.

Steering Finance

Industrial policy must not lose sight of underlying economic issues.

Industrial Policy Requires Experimentation

Setting a mission requires bold leadership, but following through requires learning and iterative experimentation.

State of Emergency

The answer cannot lie in the sound creation of an “industrial policy,” however ambitious. We need wholesale structural reform.

Why We Need an Agency for National Technology Strategy

While missions are important, even more important are new institutions that will cut a path across them.

Getting Down to Cases

Public policy needs to make some hard choices about priorities and strategies.

Industrial Policy’s Comeback

We need a mission-oriented approach to the economy that embraces an active role for government in spurring growth and innovation.

What Is Infrastructure, Anyway?

The fight over the American Jobs Plan reflects a long history of competing visions of public works—and, most of all, who should benefit from rebuilding.

The United States Can Afford More Refugees

East African countries host seven times more refugees than we do. Their policies look beyond their borders; so should ours.

Housing Is a Social Good

The American Jobs Plan mirrors past efforts at affordable housing that contributed to our problems and failed Black Americans. We need to take housing out of the private market.

Poland’s Memory Politics Are Rewriting History

The country’s ruling party is suppressing research and cultural work on the role of ethnic Poles in the persecution of Poland’s Jews.

How Israel Weaponizes International Law

The country has manipulated rules of engagement to serve its colonialist project in Palestine.

The Menthol Cigarette Ban Shows There Is No Democracy Without Petitions

The menthol cigarette citizen’s petition recalls the lost political tradition of petition democracy, when not only could the complaints of any citizen get a hearing, but that hearing would occur publicly—in Congress.

The Long History of Failed Police Reform

A century of failed attempts in Minneapolis.

Eroding the Regulatory State

The stakes of religious exemption challenges.

Derek Chauvin and the Myth of the Impartial Juror

What should “impartiality” mean for jurors in a historically unequal criminal legal system?

Use Sunlight Locally (or Lose It)

A new “solar homesteading law” could harness rays of sun that fall on roofs and parking lots in cities and advance the aims of energy democracy.

Is There a Right to Heresy?

A proposed French bill says so. But, strictly speaking, there can be no such thing as blasphemy within the terms of secular public order.

Who Deserves to Be Forgiven?

Forgiveness is a public good, but it is doled out unevenly. Justice demands we widen its reach beyond the select few.

How Law Made Neoliberalism

If we are to emerge from this era of crisis, we need legal thinking that operates on fundamentally different presumptions.

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