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Constitutional Economic Justice: Structural Power For "We The People", Martha T. Mccluskey

Journal Articles

Toward that goal, this essay proposes a structural principle of collective economic power for “we the people.” This principle is both consistent with longstanding Constitutional ideals and tailored to the current challenges of neoliberal ideology and policy. It develops two premises: first, it rejects the neoliberal economic ideology that defines legitimate power and freedom as individualized “choice” constrained by an existing political economy. Instead, this proposed principle recognizes that meaningful political economic freedom and power fundamentally consist of access to collective organizations with potential to create a “more perfect union” with better and less constrained options. Second, the post-Lochner principle …

Stuck: Fictions, Failures And Market Talk As Race Talk, Athena D. Mutua

Journal Articles

ClassCrits is a network of scholars and activists interested in critical analysis of law, the economy, and inequality. We aim to better integrate the rich diversity of economic methods and theories into law by exploring and engaging a variety of heterodox economic theories; including reviving, from the margins and shadowy past, discussions of class relations and their possible relevance to the contemporary context.

As a participant in the ClassCrits VI conference entitled, “Stuck in Forward: Debt, Austerity and the Possibilities of the Political”, I sat there at the end of the first day and puzzled over the fact that our …

Partitioning And Rights: The Supreme Court’S Accidental Jurisprudence Of Democratic Process, James A. Gardner

Journal Articles

In democracies that allocate to a court responsibility for interpreting and enforcing the constitutional ground rules of democratic politics, the sheer importance of the task would seem to oblige such courts to guide their rulings by developing an account of the nature and prominent features of the constitutional commitment to democracy. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, has from the beginning refused to develop a general account – a theory – of how the U.S. Constitution establishes and structures democratic politics. The Court’s diffidence left a vacuum at the heart of its constitutional jurisprudence of democratic process, and like most vacuums, …

From The Welfare State To The Militarized Market: Losing Choices, Controlling Losers, Martha T. Mccluskey

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 1 in Accumulating Insecurity: Violence and Dispossession in the Making of Everyday Life, Shelley Feldman, Charles Geisler & Gayatri A. Menon, eds.

Beneath a libertarian surface, free market economic ideas and policies have helped rationalize the strengthening of anti-democratic moral and political fundamentalism. The triumph of market freedom has been accompanied by increasing authoritarian government control in many spheres.

This chapter explains how a two-step rhetorical move in prevailing economic ideology turns authoritarianism and austerity into the route to freedom and growth. First, free market ideology constructs the increasingly limited and bad economic choices of a declining …

Jeremy I. Levitt's Africa: Mapping New Boundaries In International Law, Makau Wa Mutua

Book Reviews

This is a review of Jeremy Levitt’s edited collection of chapters in Africa: Mapping the Boundaries of International Law, which is an impressive work to the dearth of scholarship on Africa’s contribution to the normative substance and theory of international law. The book explicitly seeks to counter the racist mythology that Africans were tabula rasa in international law. In his own introduction to the book, Levitt makes it clear that “Africa is a legal marketplace, not a lawless basket case.” The eight contributors to the book are renowned scholars who make the case that Africa is not stuck in pre-history …

Anti-Regulatory Absolutism In The Campaign Arena: Citizens United And The Implied Slippery Slope, James A. Gardner

Journal Articles

Perhaps the most striking feature of the Supreme Court’s constitutional campaign jurisprudence is its longstanding, profound hostility to virtually any government regulation whatsoever of campaign speech and spending. Such an approach is highly unusual in constitutional law, which typically tolerates at least some level of regulatory intervention even with respect to strongly protected rights. The Court’s behavior in this respect is consistent with – and, I argue, is best understood as – the kind of behavior in which a court engages when it fears a slide down a slippery slope. But what lies at the bottom of the slope? And …

Razing The Citizen: Economic Inequality, Gender, And Marriage Tax Reform, Martha T. Mccluskey

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 12 in Gender Equality: Dimensions of Women's Equal Citizenship, Linda C. McClain & Joanna L. Grossman, eds.

This chapter links the failure of U.S. social citizenship ideals to a broader weakness in U.S. ideas citizenship. To better advance policies of economic equality, U.S. law and politics needs a stronger vision not just of economic equality, but of gender equality and of democracy in general. Feminist scholars have analyzed how ideas about gender help shape the common assumption that the costs of raising and sustaining capable, productive citizens are largely private family responsibilities. But ideas about gender also …

New York's Judicial Selection Process Is Fine – It's The Party System That Needs Fixing, James A. Gardner

Other Scholarship

New York's system of electing lower court judges has long been notorious for providing the appearance of democracy without any of the substance. Although the people are given an opportunity to vote for judges, the really meaningful choices about who will run, where, and whether judicial elections will even be contested have for years been made by party insiders. Last year, in a case soon to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Second Circuit invalidated New York's method of electing judges on the ground that it violates the associational rights of party rank and file. In this brief …

Environmental Certification Systems And U.S. Environmental Law: Closer Than You May Think, Errol E. Meidinger

Journal Articles

Many industrial organizations are committing to achieve improved environmental performance through non-governmentally instituted environmental certification programs. Such programs typically define the environmental standards that firms must meet as well as the organizational mechanisms required to achieve and "certify" compliance. Well known examples include the chemical industry's "Responsible Care" program, the International Organization for Standardization's "ISO 14000" environmental management program, and the Forest Stewardship Council's well-managed forests program.

Because of their ostensibly private and voluntary nature, environmental certification programs are often presumed to be separate and distinct from law. In fact, however, they are deeply intertwined with law, and seem likely …

Justice Under Siege: The Rule Of Law And Judicial Subservience In Kenya, Makau Wa Mutua

Journal Articles

The piece examines the tortured history of the judiciary in Kenya and concludes that various governments have deliberately robbed judges of judicial independence. As such, the judiciary has become part and parcel of the culture of impunity and corruption. This was particularly under the one party state, although nothing really changed with the introduction of a more open political system. The article argues that judicial subservience is one of the major reasons that state despotism continues to go unchallenged. It concludes by underlining the critical role that the judiciary has to play in a democratic polity.