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.
37 articles
The Shadow Budget: Donor-Advised Funds, Dark Money, and the Administrative Map of Power
The shadow budget is not crime; it is design—a way of cooling taxes while heating influence, upgrading donor optionality into campaign durability. From DAFs to c(4)s to administrative calendars, this is the atlas of a gradient most cities cannot see but all cities feel.
August 19, 2025
The Movement Tax: Noncompetes Cage Workers
Thirty million workers bound by noncompetes; one quarter licensed with credentials that won't cross state lines. These are not guardrails—they are tollgates. A Friction Index maps the cost of movement; a Mobility Atlas charts the reform.
August 17, 2025
The Landlord Leviathan: REITs, Private Equity, and the Price of Shelter
The landlord is no longer the woman downstairs with keys—it is a spreadsheet that lives in Delaware and dreams in waterfalls. When REITs and private equity own the marginal stock, rent becomes the solution to a covenant, not a neighborly bargain. A systems anatomy of financialized housing.
August 9, 2025
Shrink to Grow: The Buyback Paradox That Hollowed American Industry
Rule 10b-18 created a safe harbor for buybacks in 1982. What followed was not theft but diversion—each dollar buying back shares cannot build factories, train workers, or seed the future. A patient anatomy of the machine and the futures it withheld.
August 2, 2025
The Shadow Official Language: Spanish in Court
Why a bilingual republic is good law, good engineering, and the cheapest reform we haven't finished. Walk the United States with your ears open and you'll hear what the Census writes in ledgers: nearly one in five people speaks a language other than English at home—Spanish by far the most.
July 24, 2025
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.
July 21, 2025
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.
July 20, 2025
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.
July 19, 2025
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.
July 17, 2025
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.
July 14, 2025