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
Reclaiming the Commons: Public Space as Power
Land grants, acequias, and the quiet path to Spanish-American co-stewardship. Every country carries an official fiction about who first drew the lines. In the American Southwest, the neatest fiction says the United States arrived to find a blank ledger, then wrote order into wilderness.
The Price of Roots: Licensing Immobility
Thirty million Americans are bound by noncompete clauses; one in four workers faces licensing barriers. These restraints suppress wages, block entrepreneurship, and turn exit into a debt event. The fix: ban broad restraints, price the narrow ones, port credentials.
The Buyback Standard: How Rule 10b-18 Turned Markets Into One-Way ATMs
A 1982 SEC safe harbor made buybacks routine. Today they move hundreds of billions quarterly, driven by EPS targets and executive comp—with thin disclosure and lopsided gains. The tool isn't the problem; the incentives and opacity are.
When Cities Stopped Asking Permission
As federal gridlock persists, American cities are becoming laboratories of democratic innovation—challenging traditional hierarchies of governance.
The Shadow Constitution: Administrative Law
How Spain and France still shape American rights—if you know where to look. Every legal system keeps a diary and a dream. Ours files the diary under 'common law' and the dream under 'the Constitution.' But across the South and West there is a third ledger—stamped in Spanish and French—that still.
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.
What DOGE Actually Did: Ten Months of Fake Savings and Real Damage
What looks like subtraction is often scorched ground; what looks like reform is frequently a breach of law. Ten months in, DOGE's balance sheet is legible—and the arithmetic of claims versus facts reveals a permanent contest between institutions designed to be slow and appetites designed to perform.
The Ledger and the Labyrinth: Jared Kushner, Trumpworld, and the New Arithmetic of Power
Start with a ledger—not credits and debits, but favors as tender, time as compound interest, the Republic's attention as tradable asset. Jared Kushner sits at the fulcrum: family to the president, consiglieri to sovereign money, recurring name in deals from Balkan riverfronts to American media.
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.
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.