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The earlier book, 51 Imperfect Solutions, told stories about specific state and federal individual constitutional rights, and explained two benefits of American federalism: how two sources of constitutional protection for liberty and property rights could be valuable to individual freedom and how the state courts could be useful laboratories of innovation when it comes to the development of national constitutional rights. This book tells the other half of the story. Instead of focusing on state constitutional individual rights, it focuses on state constitutional structure. Everything in law and politics, including individual rights, eventually comes back to divisions of power and the evergreen question: Who decides? The goal of this book is to tell the structure side of the story and to identify the shifting balances of power revealed when one accounts for American constitutional law as opposed to just federal constitutional law. Who Decides? contains three main parts—one each on the judicial, executive, and legislative branches—as well as stand-alone chapters on home-rule issues raised by local governments and the benefits and burdens raised by the ease of amending state constitutions. A theme in the book is the increasingly stark divide between the ever-more-democratic nature of state governments and the ever-less-democratic nature of the federal government over time.

Ambition is a dominant force in human civilization, driving its greatest achievements and most horrific abuses. Our striving has brought art, airplanes, and antibiotics, as well as wars, genocide, and despotism. This mixed record raises obvious concerns about how we can channel ambition in the most productive directions. To that end, the book begins by exploring three central focuses of ambition: recognition, power, and money. It argues that an excessive preoccupation with these external markers for success can be self-defeating for individuals and toxic for society. Discussion then shifts to the obstacles to constructive ambition and the consequences when ambitions are skewed or blocked by inequality and identity-related characteristics such as gender, race, class, and national origin. Attention also centers on the ways that families, schools, and colleges might play a more effective role in developing positive ambition. The book concludes with an exploration of what sorts of ambitions contribute to sustained well-being. Contemporary research makes clear that even from a purely self-interested perspective, individuals would do well to strive for some goals that transcend the self. Pursuing objectives that have intrinsic value, such as building relationships and contributing to society, generally brings greater fulfillment than chasing extrinsic rewards such as wealth, power, and fame. And society benefits when ambitions for self-advancement do not crowd out efforts for the common good. The hope is to prompt readers to reconsider where their ambitions are leading and whether that destination reflects their deepest needs and highest aspirations.

The past two decades have seen renewed scholarly and popular interest in the law and morality of war. Positions that originated in the late Middle Ages through the seventeenth century have received more sophisticated philosophical elaboration. Although many contemporary writers draw on ideas that figure prominently in Kant’s moral philosophy, his explicit discussions of war have not been brought into their proper place within these discussions and debates. Kant argues that a special morality governs the permissible use of force because of war’s distinctive immorality. He characterizes war as barbaric, because in war, might makes right—which side prevails does not depend on who is in the right. The very thing that makes war wrongful also provides the appropriate standard for evaluating the conduct of war, and the only basis for law governing war.

This book highlights the framework of new EU-UK relationships, which confirms that Brexit continues to be driven by law and politics. It details how the UK political desires to assert sovereignty and EU legal constraints on what could be agreed shaped the negotiation from the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) to the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA).

This book argues that US democracy presumes a news industry but that industry currently is failing. It focuses on the contributions of digital platforms and legal rules to the current situation and on the government's responsibilities for alleviating the problem. As the book shows, the First Amendment of the US Constitution assumes the existence and durability of a private industry. Despite some concerns that government action now is not permitted, nothing in the Constitution forecloses government action to regulate concentrated economic power, to require disclosure of who is financing communications, or to support news initiatives where there are market failures. Moreover, the federal government always been involved in shaping the media environment; it has contributed financial resources, laws, and regulations to develop and shape media in the United States. The government has subsidized development of the internet and crafted legal immunities for digital platforms; the government has crafted the direction and contours of America's media ecosystem. The shift of people’s attention to media platforms that borrow news stories without paying for them and spread misinformation jeopardizes journalism, reliable news sources, and the very respect for truth-telling. To maintain government accountability and inform a public as required in a democracy, The book outlines an array of reforms, including a new fairness doctrine, regulating digital platforms as public utilities, using antitrust authority to regulate the media, policing fraud, and more robust funding of public media. As the text stresses, such reforms are not merely plausible ideas; they are the kinds of initiatives needed if the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press continues to hold meaning in the twenty-first century.

Antitrust law has very rarely been used by workers to challenge anticompetitive employment practices. Yet recent empirical research shows that labor markets are highly concentrated, and that employers engage in practices that harm competition and suppress wages. These practices include no-poaching agreements, wage-fixing, mergers, covenants not to compete, and misclassification of gig workers as independent contractors. This failure of antitrust to challenge labor-market misbehavior is due to a range of other failures—intellectual, political, moral, and economic. And the impact of this failure has been profound for wage levels, economic growth, and inequality. In light of the recent empirical work, it is urgent for regulators, courts, lawyers, and Congress to redirect antitrust resources to labor market problems. This book offers a strategy for judicial and legislative reform.

Progressives who opposed the Trump administration’s policies found themselves repeatedly relying on constitutional principles grounded in federalism, separation of powers, and free speech to resist the federal government. Although many progressives had either criticized or underemphasized those principles before Trump, the principles became vital to progressive causes after Trump was elected. Using dozens of examples from the ways in which Trump abused presidential powers, this book explains how the three sets of principles can help mitigate the harms that autocratic leaders in the Trump mold can inflict on both democratic institutions and vulnerable minorities. In doing so, the book urges progressives to follow this rule of thumb in the post-Trump era: if a constitutional principle was worth deploying to resist Trump’s harmful policies and autocratic governance, then it is likely worth defending in the post-Trump era even if it makes the short-term attainment of progressive objectives more difficult. This type of principled constitutionalism is essential not only because being principled is good in and of itself, but also because being principled in matters related to federalism, separation of powers, and free speech will help both advance progressive causes over the long run and reduce the threats posed by future autocratic leaders in the Trump mold to our system of self-governance, to our democratic values, and to traditionally subordinated minorities. Going forward, progressives should promote and defend constitutional principles grounded in federalism, separation of powers, and free speech regardless of whether they have an ally or an opponent in the White House.

Following a national referendum on 23 June 2016, the UK announced its intention to end its decades-long membership of the EU. That decision initiated a process of complex negotiations, governed by Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, with a view to making the arrangements required for an ‘orderly Brexit’. This book explores the UK’s departure from the EU from a legal perspective. As well as analysing the various constitutional principles relevant to ‘EU withdrawal law’, and detailing the main issues and problems arising during the Brexit process itself, the book provides a critical analysis of the final EU–UK Withdrawal Agreement—including dedicated chapters on the future protection of citizens’ rights, the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, and the prospects for future EU–UK relations in fields such as trade and security.

Sovereignty is the vital organizing principle of modern international law. The Right of Sovereignty examines the origins of that principle in the legal and political thought of its most influential theorist, Jean Bodin (1529/30–1596). As Daniel Lee argues in this study, Bodin’s most lasting theoretical contribution was his thesis that sovereignty must be conceptualized as an indivisible bundle of legal rights constitutive of statehood. While these uniform ‘rights of sovereignty’ licensed all states to exercise numerous exclusive powers, including the ‘absolute power’ to ‘absolve’ and release its citizens from legal duties, they were ultimately derived from, and therefore limited by, the law of nations. The book explores Bodin’s creative synthesis of classical sources in philosophy, history, and the medieval legal science of Roman and canon law in crafting the rules governing state-centric politics. The Right of Sovereignty is the first book in English on Bodin’s legal and political theory to be published in nearly a half-century and surveys themes overlooked in modern Bodin scholarship: empire, war, conquest, slavery, citizenship, commerce, territory, refugees, and treaty obligations. It will interest specialists in political theory and the history of modern political thought, as well as legal history, the philosophy of law, and international law.

In this third edition, the collection of essays which has traced the evolution of major areas of EU law and policy over the years since the foundation of the European entity has been updated and significantly revised. It has been revised to include not only updates on most of the substantive fields of law covered, but also a range of new chapters and an analysis of the many developments which have shaped those fields of law over the turbulent European decade since the publication of the second edition. Amongst the new issue areas included are chapters on the Rule of Law, Judicial Reform, Brexit, Constitutional and Legal Theory, Refugee and Asylum law, and Data Governance.