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
Blueprints and Blockades: Latin America's Planning Wins—and the Times They Were Stopped
Latin America did not lack planners or plans. It lacked uninterrupted time. Over the last century, the region produced sophisticated projects in transport, health, energy, and social protection. Many took root and quietly improved daily life. Others were intercepted—often by U.S. power, sometimes by U.S.-based firms—before they could mature.
December 4, 2025
The Client Is the People: On Lawyers Who Mistake a President for a Republic
In the labyrinth of American law, the first wrong turn is often grammatical. Swap a singular for a plural—the President for the People—and a whole architecture shifts by degrees until courthouses feel like vestibules to a single man's will. What opens as error hardens into habit; what begins as advocacy calcifies into allegiance.
November 28, 2025
What DOGE Actually Did: Ten Months of Fake Savings and Real Damage
What looks like subtraction is often scorched ground; what looks like reform is frequently a breach of law. Ten months in, DOGE's balance sheet is legible—and the arithmetic of claims versus facts reveals a permanent contest between institutions designed to be slow and appetites designed to perform.
November 23, 2025
Fear, Trump, and the Edit: When One Splice Weaponizes an Entire Newsroom
A miscut speech, a $5 billion threat, and two resignations: how the BBC crisis reveals the asymmetric warfare against independent media. When power hunts for seams in newsroom armor, every error becomes a hostage situation—and even UK Labour ministers declare the BBC "must change."
November 15, 2025
The Art of Witness: How Experts, Archives, and Doctrine Restored Indian Country
In American Indian law, the most transformative victories seldom arrive with parades. They arrive as sentences: "Congress has not said otherwise." Those sentences depend on an architecture—expert affidavits, maps, ledgers, and a disciplined order of proof—that turns memory into law.
November 14, 2025
App-Store States: Platforms as Quasi-Governments
In the museum of code there is a wing where the labels feel like laws. Merchants line up with packages and petitions, and somewhere deep inside the glass, an algorithm arranges who may be seen, which is a form of sovereignty.
November 7, 2025
The Care Grid: Treating Childcare and Eldercare as Infrastructure
Every city has a network you can't point to on a map. It runs under the hours of the day, not the streets. Treat care as a grid—with uptime targets, dispatch rules, and capacity planning—not as weather.
November 7, 2025
The Harm in the Middle: How 'Both-Sideism' Is Strangling Independent, Critical Media
Both-sideism is not neutrality; it is a production method that assigns equal weight to unequal claims, awards airtime as if truth were a parity contract, and punishes outlets that test reality before publishing. In today's asymmetric politics, this method doesn't balance coverage—it subsidizes bad faith and bankrupts independent, critical media.
November 4, 2025
Guardianship as Extraction: How Courts Dispossessed Native Wealth
In the American West, conquest moved indoors—into county probate courts. For Native families, the guardianship complex from 1890s-1950s didn't protect wealth; it redirected it through "approved" sales and fees that left wards with little more than a file.
November 3, 2025
After Ten Months: What We've Learned About Power, Policing, and the Word We Hesitate to Use
Ten months into Trump's second term, we have enough evidence to test the term "fascist" in practice. Not by tallying tweets, but by looking at state power: who it targets, how it moves, and what it leaves behind. Three arenas tell the story: immigration enforcement, elections, and deployments as leverage.
October 31, 2025