How democratic institutions actually work—and for whom. We investigate Supreme Court doctrine, voting rights litigation, municipal rebellion, participatory budgeting, judicial activism, executive immunity, and the administrative state. From Chevron deference to bilingual governance, legal architecture shapes daily life.
55 articles
Upstairs Subsidies: Bailouts, Class, and the American Idea of Capitalism
In U.S. crises, public money moves fastest through pipes that already exist for capital. Banks receive oxygen in hours; households receive forms. The result is a recovery that tilts upward. This essay maps the architecture of those upstairs subsidies, the class and political consequences, and a.
The Registry of Narrow Doors: Pedigree, Privilege, and the Lost Republic of Talent
A registry exists in America—not written on paper, but in the quiet agreements between deans and donors, the lists passed from one elite institution to the next. It is a map of how pedigree is formed, multiplied, and normalized; how a child's odds of admission to selective colleges correlate with.
The War America Won: Ukraine and the Paradox of Strategic Defeat
Three years into Russia's invasion, Western commentators still speak of Putin's failure. But viewed through the lens of great-power fracture, energy architecture, technology sovereignty, and Global South realignment, the war's true victors may not be who we assumed—and the United States sits atop a.
The Donroe Doctrine - Mapping Trump's Global Threat Matrix
Trump's Donroe Doctrine isn't foreign policy - it's a business plan. Every threat advances authoritarian power consolidation and billionaire class wealth extraction.
HBO for Sale, Democracy for Lease
There are corporate deals that feel like weather—impersonal, atmospheric. And then there are deals where someone is adjusting the thermostat: deciding who gets heat and who gets frost. The battle for Warner Bros. Discovery belongs to the second category.
The Consent Economy: Big Tech vs the People
The country is a mirror, but the mirror charges admission. From lobbying ledgers to algorithmic feeds, from data extraction to political influence, the machinery of consent has been privatized. A systems anatomy of how wealth, technology, and power intersect to reshape democracy.
The Art of Witness: How Experts, Archives, and Doctrine Restored Indian Country
In American Indian law, the most transformative victories seldom arrive with parades. They arrive as sentences: "Congress has not said otherwise." Those sentences depend on an architecture—expert affidavits, maps, ledgers, and a disciplined order of proof—that turns memory into law.
App-Store States: Platforms as Quasi-Governments
In the museum of code there is a wing where the labels feel like laws. Merchants line up with packages and petitions, and somewhere deep inside the glass, an algorithm arranges who may be seen, which is a form of sovereignty.
The Care Grid: Treating Childcare and Eldercare as Infrastructure
Every city has a network you can't point to on a map. It runs under the hours of the day, not the streets. Treat care as a grid—with uptime targets, dispatch rules, and capacity planning—not as weather.
Guardianship as Extraction: How Courts Dispossessed Native Wealth
In the American West, conquest moved indoors—into county probate courts. For Native families, the guardianship complex from 1890s-1950s didn't protect wealth; it redirected it through "approved" sales and fees that left wards with little more than a file.