What is White privilege? In this Essay, I explore the privileges that White men take for granted in dealing with the police, even as I acknowledge that the most privileged Americans are still potentially subject to arbitrary and unaccountable police abuses. I also examine the debate over...

This was an invited keynote article for Economics & Labour Relations Review. The article places the debate over the debt ceiling in the context of anti-deficit orthodoxy, explaining how the American political debate has turned into a parody of itself, with right-wing politicians using an...

In a stylized, parliamentary-style debate, one of the participants on the opposing team was not able to attend, so Neil H. Buchanan became N. Harold Buchanan and argued for the opposing side. Buchanan's alter ego noted that, because Congress has enacted an array of incentives to encourage...

This essay is an edited version of my remarks during the first panel of the Mississippi College Law Review’s symposium on health care reform, which was held on February 26, 2010, in Jackson, Mississippi. The essay integrates my prepared comments with my responses to comments and questions...

In the United States, it is common for legal scholars, economists, politicians and others to claim that we are selfishly harming "our children and grandchildren" by (among many other things) running large government budget deficits. This article first asks two broad questions: (1) Do we owe...

In August 2011, Congress and the President narrowly averted economic and political catastrophe, agreeing at the last possible moment to authorize a series of increases in the national debt ceiling. This respite, unfortunately, was merely temporary. The amounts of the increases in the debt...

If the debt ceiling is inconsistent with existing spending and taxing laws, what must the President do? In earlier work, we argued that when Congress creates a “trilemma” — making it impossible for the President to spend as much as Congress has ordered, to tax only as much as Congress has...