It’s a moment for both hope and hesitation: recent victories in Michigan, Colorado, Minnesota, and New York suggest gathering political momentum on the left. Yet a defeat in Wisconsin and a judge’s temporary stay of New York City’s pied-à-terre tax offer reminders that every movement for social progress breeds its own countervailing reaction. But how does that reaction itself build power? The scaffolding for backlash, as the New York City decision suggests, is often found in the legal system.

Steep barriers to court access as well as the formidably technical nature of many legal disputes mean that insiders commonly have the ability not merely to secure the outcomes they want, but also to shape the rules under which notionally fair competition unfolds. This “playing for rules,” rather than for specific results, means that law often offers the inside track for incumbents’ ground-rigging projects.

Across seemingly unrelated legal developments, lawyers and judges have been pursuing such projects of late. Each change is leading to a concentration of power in electoral politics and economic power, in ways that insulate insiders. And the effects accumulate: they feed each other, leading to a vicious circle of increasingly obdurate concentrations of power.