Print Archive
There is no such thing as a free bankruptcy.
Abraham is a young student with Down syndrome living in Los Angeles. He attends a specialized school for students with unique educational needs.
CBA is a decision procedure whose normative basis is what Professor Matthew Adler and one of us has called weak welfarism. Welfarism is the principle that the well-being of people is morally important.
In the midst of a New England winter long ago, young people of Boston filed into a drafty meeting hall up the road from the harbor. They had assembled on that January morning in 1839 for the seventh annual meeting of the New England Anti-Slavery Society.
A criminal defendant is charged with wire fraud in violation of 18 USC § 1343. As he and his defense attorney prepare for trial, the US Attorney’s Office notifies him that there is reason to believe he has previously committed bankruptcy fraud in violation of 18 USC § 152.
The number of low-risk defendants who spend time in pretrial detention in this country is staggering: “Every year, more than 11 million people move through America’s 3,100 local jails, many on low-level, non-violent misdemeanors.”
In the US constitutional system, the executive branch generally conducts foreign relations. But in recent years, the nonexecutive branches—the judiciary and Congress—have challenged the exclusivity of the president’s authority to conduct foreign relations by opening direct channels of communication with foreign governments’ executive branches.
Political sociologist Claus Offe has diagnosed the participatory deficit in North Atlantic democracies as the product of an imbalance in state–market relations. When the market is supreme, public policy can do little to constrain the market’s ever-expanding realms.
By now, we know the pattern: A constitutional democracy, flawed but in reasonably good standing, is hit by a transformative election.
With the rise of populist political leaders in the West, such as President Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen, the study of populism has become a central concern.
History confounds certainty. Barely a quarter century after the collapse of the Soviet empire, it is democracy that has entered an intense period of public scrutiny.