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.
