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.
38 articles
Six Votes: The Supreme Court Revolution
The Roberts Court before and after 2020—how a jurisprudence of 'tradition' remapped power, rights, and the administrative state. Historians will draw a clean fold in the timeline of the Roberts Court. On one side (2005–2019): incrementalism with sharp elbows.
July 14, 2025
Power Lines as Colonial Control
Puerto Rico's democracy, bankruptcy, and the grid that could teach the mainland how to heal. If you want to see the United States without makeup, fly to San Juan and wait for the lights to flicker. In that twitch you can read the whole civics lesson: a people who are citizens without a presidential.
July 10, 2025
Brackeen: The Case Against Tribal Sovereignty
Louisiana v. Callais and the quiet attempt to end Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Some revolutions arrive as fireworks. Others arrive as docket numbers. Louisiana v. Callais is the latter—a case that began as a fight over one congressional map and swelled into a vehicle that could cripple or.
July 7, 2025
The Language Penalty: Speaking Spanish Costs Power
How to run elections, permits, and emergencies in two languages—and why it makes a republic smarter. Every morning, millions of Americans begin their day in Spanish and end it in English (or vice versa). The republic is bilingual in fact, yet too many of our most consequential interactions with.
July 3, 2025
The Profit-Price Channel: How Market Power Turns Shocks into Inflation
Between what we pay and what it cost to make runs a corridor of hidden doors—contracts, fees, platforms, habits—where a quiet arithmetic decides how much of a shock becomes a price and how much becomes a profit. The profit-price channel, mapped with equations and evidence.
July 1, 2025
The Activist Card: Judicial Hypocrisy
Conservative judging since the 1980s—and the paradox of a movement that won by denouncing its own reflection. The term 'judicial activism' is the judiciary's favorite insult and our public square's dullest knife. Everyone uses it to describe the decisions they don't like; few define it before.
June 30, 2025
The Activists Who Said They Weren't
How a conservative legal movement rewrote American law from the 1980s to today. For forty years, the conservative legal movement has sold a deceptively simple ethic: judges should interpret, not make, the law. The method was restraint; the result was revolution.
June 26, 2025
The Archive: Spanish Records Prove Native Claims
Building the bilingual memory infrastructure the United States forgot it needed. A country that cannot search its past will mis-govern its future. Ours keeps half its memory in another language—acequia minutes, merced deeds, mission ledgers, notarial protocols, diseños, parish censuses—a.
June 23, 2025