Liberals have been introspecting (some may say self-flagellating) since the 2024 election, to varying degrees of convincingness and success. There’s the usual genre of complaints—NIMBYism, identity politics, the crisis of masculinity, forgetting about the factory man—but the one thing liberals agree on is that they can’t be blamed for following their good, apolitical science. Today’s guests want you to rethink that. We’re thrilled to have on Frances Lee, Professor of Politics and Public Affairs, and Stephen Macedo, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and the University Center for Human Values, both at Princeton University, to discuss their new book, In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us.

We open up the book by asking our guests why they wrote this book—why attack liberals’ response to the COVID pandemic, and why now? Lee and Macedo argue that liberal science and policymaking early in the pandemic faced multiple epistemic failures, from undisclosed conflicts of interest to the silencing of opinions outside the mainstream. David defends the United States’s COVID policy response, but Lee and Macedo press their point that value-laden judgments were made by state and local officials who avoided responsibility by claiming to follow the science. We wrap up the episode with a discussion of scientific expertise in modern democracies.

This podcast is generously supported by Themis Bar Review.

Referenced Readings

• Great Barrington Declaration

• “Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?” by Eran Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya

• “What Sparked the COVID Pandemic? Mounting Evidence Points to Raccoon Dogs” by Smriti Mallapaty

• “Statement in Support of the Scientists, Public Health Professionals, and Medical Professionals of China Combating COVID-19” by Charles Calisher et al.

• “Everyone Wore Masks During the 1918 Flu Pandemic. They Were Useless.” by Eliza McGraw

• “The Covid Alarmists Were Closer to the Truth Than Anyone Else” by David Wallace-Wells

• The Swine Flu Affair: Decision-Making on a Slippery Disease by Richard E. Neustadt and Harvey V. Fineberg

In the face of what is inarguably bad governance and fake—but spectacular!—technocracy (the list goes on and on, but we’ll stop at AI-generated tariffs), we thought we’d take a moment to join the conversation about what good governance looks like. A couple of weeks ago, one of us reviewed Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance, for the New York Times, and then the other one of us reviewed the review. So we figured: let’s work it out on the pod? No guests on this episode, just the two of us in a brass-tacks, brass-knuckles discussion of the abundance agenda and the goals of twenty-first century economic policy.

We dive right into what the abundance agenda is and who its enemies are: innovators and builders against NIMBYs and environmentalists on David’s account; techno-utopians who discount the environment and politics on Sam’s. We agree that housing policy, at least, has helped the better-off create a cycle of entrenching their position through stymieing construction and production. We find another point of agreement on how Klein and Thomson’s abundance agenda attempts to harness the power of the state to build, and that certain left-wing critiques are off base, but disagree about whether their proposal is a break from the neoliberal era of governance and what that even was. In some ways, we end up right where we started, disagreeing about whether the abundance agenda seeks to unleash a dammed-up tide that can lift all boats, or whether the abundance agenda leaves behind everyone but a vanguard of “innovators” in the technology and finance sectors. Let us know if you’ve got a convincing answer.

This podcast is generously supported by Themis Bar Review.

Referenced Readings

• Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress―and How to Bring It Back by Marc Dunkelman

• Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity by Yoni Appelbaum

• On the Housing Crisis: Land, Development, Democracy by Jerusalem Demsas

• One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias

• “Kludgeocracy: The American Way of Policy” by Steven Teles

• The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War by Robert Gordon

• The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

• Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism by Paul Sabin

• “The State Capacity Crisis” by Nicholas Bagley and David Schleicher

• Red State Blues: How the Conservative Revolution Stalled in the States by Matt Grossmann

• The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles

• “Why has Regional Income Convergence in the U.S. Declined?” by Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag

• “Exclusionary Zoning’s Confused Defenders” by David Schleicher

• “Cost Disease Socialism: How Subsidizing Costs While Restricting Supply Drives America’s Fiscal Imbalance” by Steven Teles, Samuel Hammond, and Daniel Takash

• ”On Productivism” by Dani Rodrik 

Happy February, listeners, and welcome to season ten of Digging a Hole! When we started the pod five years ago, we had our eyes on the Grammys, or maybe the Emmys, whatever award show we could finagle our way into. Turns out we have bigger fish to fry than whether or not we’re more deserving of an award than Call Her Daddy — Greenland, anyone? We’re thrilled to be kicking off this season with someone who knows a great deal about United States Empire: Allison Powers Useche, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and author of the new book, Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law.

Powers Useche kicks us off with a discussion of the use of the arbitration forum as a place to hear what we now think of as international public law claims, including challenges to racial violence and Jim Crow. We dive into some case studies about how ordinary people across the Americas fought the United States in arbitration and offer competing interpretations about how to think about what happened from a legal realist perspective. Finally, we get Powers Useche’s take on how environmentalists, Indigenous groups, and others are using the tools of private economic law to contest empire today. 

This podcast is generously supported by Themis Bar Review.

Referenced Readings

• Mestizo International Law: A Global Intellectual History 1842–1933 by Arnulf Becker Lorca

• The Hidden History of International Law in the Americas: Empire and Legal Networks by Juan Pablo Scarfi

• Legalist Empire: International Law and American Foreign Relations in the Early Twentieth Century by Benjamin Allen Coates

• The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas by Monica Muñoz Martinez

The start of a new year, the slouch towards the first days of the new semester, the last episode of yet another season of the pod: we’re feeling sentimental here at Digging a Hole HQ. As you take down your old calendars and put up the new, we’re going to take some time to engage in a tradition of ours at the pod and discuss the 2024 Harvard Law Review Supreme Court foreword, “Curation, Narration, Erasure: Power and Possibility at the U.S. Supreme Court,” with its indomitable author and the Seaman Family University Professor at Penn Carey Law, Karen M. Tani.

We begin by discussing the genre of the Harvard Law Review foreword, and how Tani’s approach differs from forewords of yore. Next, we dive deeply into each prong of Tani’s framework of curation, narration, and erasure. We turn to familiar themes of the law-politics divide and the relationship between law and history, with Tani clarifying how this past Supreme Court term adds to our understanding of these big ideas. Finally, we conclude the pod with a discussion of prophecy (and here’s one: you’re going to have a ball with this episode, so hurry up and hit play!).

This podcast is generously supported by Themis Bar Review.

Referenced Readings

Now that the election is done and dusted, and we’ve had a chance to process somehow one of the least controversial presidential races of the last few decades, America’s back to business, with Congressmen threatening international institutions, the American public spending gobsmacking amounts of money for the holiday season, and California declaring a state of emergency over bird flu. Wait a second—can states even do that? Lucky for us, today’s podcast guest is an expert on state and local government law and state constitutional law who’s written a book on the very subject. We’re thrilled to welcome back the Harold Washington Professor of Law at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, Daniel B. Rodriguez, to discuss his new (open-access!) book Good Governing: The Police Power in the American States.

Ever wondered what the terms sic utere and salus populi mean? We kick off the podcast discussing those two different approaches to the police power of the states. Rodriguez expounds on his thesis about the development of state police power by discussing all the state cases he’s read, and why legal scholars focused on the federal courts usually get things wrong. Next, we discuss the different kinds of checks that exist on state power: structural, rights-based, and democratic. We then turn to the interplay between police power on the one hand, and the state and local government relationship on the other. (Sam’s out for this one, so you know we really get into the weeds of state and local governments.) Finally, we wrap up with Rodriguez’s argument for why state capacity is a problem of state constitutional law and good governing.

This podcast is generously supported by Themis Bar Review.

Referenced Readings

The year is 2025. Department of Government Efficiency dons Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have broken ground on their new taxpayer-funded palace, the architectural plans of which look suspiciously like a Cybertruck. HHS Secretary RFK Jr. has received a standing ovation from Congress after announcing that children will be given brain worms at birth instead of vaccines. Attorney General Matt Gaetz has just announced that people who successfully stand their ground will be mailed a sticker from DOJ.

How did we get here? To help us break down the results of last week’s elections, and to offer a sounding board to Sam and David’s hot takes, joining the pod is New Yorker staff writer and political reporter Benjamin Wallace-Wells. We start off by discussing swing voters, the failures of the Democrats and the Harris campaign, and what the election results hint about the future of the Republican party. (FWIW, we recorded before the Hegseth/Gabbard/Gaetz nominations.)  We work through how the election was shaped by local concerns including perceptions of crime and disorder all the way to big international topics like the Russia-Ukraine war. Putting their heads together, Sam, David, and Wallace-Wells come up with a grand unified theory of local, national, and cultural politics in America today. Listen to find out everything you need to know about the election—and let us know if we got it right.  

This podcast is generously supported by Themis Bar Review.

Referenced Readings

On this week’s podcast, we’re going more local than we’ve ever gone before, discussing the pleasures and perils of the company town. Here to be our local guide through this topic, and discussing his forthcoming paper, “Governing the Company Town” is Brian Highsmith — a former student of David’s, Ph.D. candidate in Government and Social Policy at Harvard University, an academic fellow in law and political economy at Harvard Law School, and an affiliated senior researcher at Yale Law School’s Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law.

We begin this conversation by discussing what the company town was and what it wasn’t, legally and historically. Highsmith proposes that Madison’s theory of factions is the best conceptual framework to understand company towns, while Sam pushes back on company towns as being uniquely subject to private power. After we engage in a bit of democratic theory, David presses Highsmith on whether the answer to bad localism is good localism, and how we might regulate the municipal race to the bottom. Give the pod a listen and find out.

This podcast is generously supported by Themis Bar Review.

Referenced Readings

Good news, listeners! Our rational and responsive representatives in Washington have agreed to keep the federal government running through December 20. (As far as we know, anyway.) You might be tired of the all the backroom dealing it seems to take to keep national parks open and the wheels of our country turning. Get it together, you grumble. But as realists in the world of legal theory, we wanted to ask: what would it mean to take legislative dealmaking seriously, and is it possible for deals to be good and just? (Shoot for the moon.) And here to help with that question, hitting our pod is an expert in democratic theory and the law, a former editor of NOMOS, and the Silver Professor of Politics at New York University, Melissa Schwartzberg. On this episode, we discuss Schwartzberg and co-author Jack Knight’s doozy of a new book, Democratic Deals: A Defense of Political Bargaining.

To help with orienting our readers, Sam asks Schwartzberg to explain how political theorists and political scientists think of legislative dealmaking—and what’s missing. Schwartzberg introduces the book’s main conceptual yardstick, the equitable treatment of interests, and how looking to contract and constitutional law helps illuminate what a well-functioning legislature looks like. David, realest of the realists, pushes Schwartzberg on how her theory applies to state and local legislative bodies like the Los Angeles County Commission, before we end with a democratic-theory-inflected discussion on the role of courts in a legislative democracy.

This podcast is generously supported by Themis Bar Review.

Referenced Readings

Welcome back, dear listeners, to season nine of Digging a Hole! We’re just as surprised as you are that we haven’t been taken off the air yet, but we’re here and ready to keep producing hit after hit— at least while Yale Law School keeps funding us, anyway. After a summer of roller-coaster legal and political action, we’re ready to help you navigate the turbulent times ahead. But before we get to current events, it’s worth dwelling on history. And today we’re excited to have on the pod our colleague Jack Balkin, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School, to discuss his new book, sure to be a classic in constitutional theory, Memory and Authority: The Uses of History in Constitutional Interpretation.

To start off, Sam engages Balkin over the question of why, under the latter’s taxonomy, history isn’t a unique modality of constitutional interpretation. Next, Balkin explains what constitutional lawyers do, what makes their argumentative tools unique, and the relationship between history, memory, and the rhetoric of law. We dive into (what else?) originalism, both as an academic discipline with fancy conferences in San Diego and as a political ideology that reigns supreme in the courts (at least in cafeteria-form). If we haven’t piqued your interest, this episode features for the first time on the pod, according to our memory but perhaps not our history, one Mr. Hegel. Strap in and enjoy.

This podcast is generously supported by Themis Bar Review.

Referenced Readings

With the long weekend in the books, summer’s officially here. School’s out, and we can’t imagine why people would be thinking about American universities – has anything interesting or controversial been happening on campus recently? (Our field correspondent David Pozen reports.) Anyway, today’s episode is the last episode of the season, and we’re excited to let this one linger in your minds for the next few months. Today’s very special guest is the MacArthur “Genius” Award-winning Dylan C. Penningroth, Professor of Law and Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, here to discuss his wonderful new book Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights.

Penningroth begins by showing how his research expands the scope of African American history to everyday legal relations between Black individuals and discusses his great-great-great-uncle as a great example. After Sam and Penningroth frame the conversation as one about Black people using private rights in support of the southern economy, David follows up with a question about the inevitability of capitalism. Next, Penningroth makes the case that his account complements, instead of contradicts, the politically-focused work of W.E.B. DuBois and historians like Risa Goluboff and Eric Foner. We end this semester with some advice for social movements. See you on the other side, listeners.

This podcast is generously supported by Themis Bar Review.

Referenced Readings