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The Progressive Era, 100 Years Later
One hundred years ago, Warren Harding’s election heralded the end of the Progressive Era. Harding promised a “return to normalcy,” but neither his administration nor subsequent changes have erased the progressives’ reforms. This collection evaluates the Progressive Era echoes in modern debates about race, labor, and the bureaucracy.
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Rules, Commands, and Principles in the Administrative State
Pound and Schmitt both assumed that the administrative state would increasingly abandon general rules in favor of ad hoc administrative commands. Dworkin, however, predicted that the increasing complexity of the administrative state would induce reliance on general legal principles to maintain legal…
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From Progressivism to Paralysis
The complexity of the regulatory state undermines public goals, and leads to broad citizen alienation. The root cause is the progressive aspiration to organize government as a kind of machine producing uniform public choices. A functioning democracy requires a simpler framework allowing officials to…
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Black Progressivism and the Progressive Court
This essay discusses Black progressive texts – Thomas Fortune’s Black and White, Ida Wells’s The Reason Why, and two statements of the Niagara Movement – and explores how the themes they developed contain a critique of the underlying rationales of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence of the same period…
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“There Is No Such Thing as an Illegal Strike”: Reconceptualizing the Strike in Law and Political Economy
Workers today are rediscovering the power of the strike and upending jurisprudential categories. Strikes are not just “economic weapons”; they are political protest. And like Progressive Era strikes, the success of strikes today may be in legitimating a new vision of law and political economy.