Things to Read This Week (3/9/26)
on socialism
The big news is that the UChicago Law Review symposium is out — a marquee showdown, of sorts, between scholars from the Law and Political Economy movement and scholars from more traditional Law and Economics. Academic public reactions to this symposium so far have been fascinatingly split. Many professors I’ve heard from seem to think that half of the participants embarrassed themselves, but they disagree on which half. Cohen and Gershorn and Sanga would be places to start if you want to decide for yourselfd. The Kapcyznski and Chilton/Macey/Versteeg pieces are also obviously focal.
It’s Alive! When the Original Meaning of “Person” Protected by the Fourteenth Amendment is Not a Fixed, But Living Word. Reva Siegel takes on fetal personhood — an important person on an important topic. And if I may, one of the great things about Reva is how thoroughly and seriously she immerses herself in the arguments she engages with.
The Equity Docket, by Tom Schmidt and Kellen Funk. Important new piece on the Shadow/Emergency/Interim Docket: “Our basic contention is that the Court has assumed a far-reaching new form of equitable jurisdiction without also accepting the historical guardrails that both limited and legitimated equity.” I have often wondered if every century is consigned to rediscover the law/equity distinction in various ways.
Finally, availing myself of the Tom Stoppard exception to the implied jurisdiction of these posts, here’s Christopher Scalia on Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia. From the conclusion:
The only trilogy [Stoppard] wrote, [The Coast of Utopia] holds a singular position in his remarkable career. That he would devote his lone epic to the subject of the doomed utopian delusion of communism signals how important he believed the topic was. Perhaps when he completed it, seventeen years after the fall of the Soviet Union, audiences believed the message was irrelevant. But the same month that Stoppard died, a democratic socialist was elected mayor of America’s largest city. That gigantic Ginger Cat can thwart the hopes of radicals and conservatives alike.
First, I urge you to always post your new podcast episodes here. Selfishly I want a place to comment but I think it will be good for your distribution.
Regarding that on your discussion of supreme court leaks, I had two thoughts.
The first is whether the true purpose of the NDAs is to give the court's greater power to discover who the leaker was. Or even to discover if the leak was tacitly approved by a justice (I had a vague sense that there was some suspicion there with Dobbs).
I seem to remember that in the Dobbs leak they wanted to investigate phones of certain individuals and I suspect some of them refused. I wonder if those documents don't waive certain rights to privacy or at least allow a civil suit to be brought which allows discovery of their phones.
I wonder what happens if that raises some interesting issues of 5th amendment privlege (eg is phone password testimonial and can the government make you sign a civil contract that punishes you for exercising your 5th amendment rights) and appeals it to the court.
Second, I think you are being a bit uncareful when you ask if journalists should publish such leaks and conflating the questions of whether it is appropriate for us to have a norm that condemns journalists from publishing such leaks and if they morally ought to do so.
I take it to be pretty clear that any good consequentialist should say that if a journalist has reason to believe that the impact of their publishing a leak -- say for some reason they and they alone are trusted enough by the source so they really do control it's publication -- then they only should publish it if in fact publishing it isn't net harmful (tho this may include harms from being discovered to have withheld it). I think you gave a good argument for why we shouldn't have norms against journalists publishing such leaks.