Is the Constitution “anti-oligarchy”? What does it say about monopolies and antitrust? Legal experts Joseph Fishkin and William E. Forbath, co-authors of The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution, join law professor Katharine Jackson of the University of Dayton School of Law, and Adam White of the American Enterprise Institute, for a conversation moderated by Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center.
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Joseph Fishkin is a professor of law at UCLA School of Law. He blogs at Balkinization and his writing has appeared in various publications including the Columbia Law Review, the Supreme Court Review, the Yale Law Journal, and NOMOS. He is the author of Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity. His new book, co-authored with William Forbath, is The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy.
William Forbath holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen Chair and is Associate Dean of Research at University of Texas at Austin School of Law, where he is also a professor of history. He is the author of Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement and dozens of articles, book chapters, and essays on legal and constitutional history and theory and comparative constitutional law, in addition to The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution with Joey.He occasionally writes on legal and constitutional issues for The New York Times, The Nation, and other outlets and is currently completing a history of Jews, law, and identity politics in the 20th century. He is also starting a history of socialist lawyering and legal imagination.
Katharine Jackson is assistant professor of law at the University of Dayton School of Law, where her research explores the intersections of law, politics, and economics. Prior to her appointment, she served as the DeOlazarra Fellow in Political Philosophy, Politics and Law at the University of Virginia. She has written law review articles for several publications. She has also practiced corporate law in the state and federal courts of Delaware and New York.
Adam White is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and co-director of the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University. He is the author of a wide range of essays, book reviews, law review articles, and book chapters, and is a regular contributor to the Notice and Comment blog. He is a member of the Administrative Conference of the United States and has testified before a variety of U.S. House and Senate committees on regulatory and administrative issues.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
Additional Resources
- Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath, The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy
- The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution website
- Noah Webster, An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution
- James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Ocean and A System of Politics
- Adam White, The Atlantic, "A Republic, If We Can Keep"
- Federalist 10
- Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, "Opinion on the Constitutionality of the National Bank," in The American Republic: Primary Sources, ed. Bruce Frohnen
- Katharine Jackson, "Antitrust and Equal Liberty"
- Morrill Act (1862)
- Pacific Railyway Act of 1862
- Homestead Act (1862)
- Civil Rights Act of 1875
- Administrative Proceedures Act (1946)
- Katharine Jackson, LPE Project, "What Makes an Administrative Agency 'Democratic'"
- “The Income Tax,” in The American Nation: Primary Sources. ed. Bruce Frohnen
- West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022)
- National Federation of Independent Business v. Department of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (2022)
- Adam White, Law & Liberty blog, "The APA and the Decline of Stedy Administration"
- A.L. A. Schechter Poultry Corporation v. United States (1935)
TRANSCRIPT
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