We live in a time of profound and justified anxiety about economic opportunity. The number of Americans facing poverty is growing, opportunities for middle-class livelihoods are shrinking, and economic clout is becoming concentrated at the top to a degree that recalls the last Gilded Age. For...

"Oligarchy is a threat to the republic. Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath show that, for most of US history, Americans saw the Constitution as responding to that threat by imposing on legislators a duty to break up oligarchy, block corporate political power, and ensure a broad distribution of...

Constitutional democracy is impossible here, just as it is elsewhere, without some limits on social and economic deprivation. Mounting poverty and poverty wages, growing job insecurity, a renaissance of sweat shops, a lack of decent education, of access to health care, housing, and other basic...

Social rights - to basic income, health care, education, decent work - are indispensable for constitutional democracy. Yet it is widely believed that social rights have no place in U.S. experience. That is wrong. In the 1960s and 1970s, U.S. courts collaborated with social movements and activist...

State legislatures and the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission (EEOC) have moved in parallel in recent years to provide new protections for the employment prospects of some surprising groups: people who are unemployed, people who have poor credit, and people with past criminal convictions....