Under a pseudonym in December 2011, I published an article titled “al-Jaysh wa-l-Iqtisad fi Barr Misr” (The Army and the Economy in Egypt) in Jadaliyya. I wrote it after months of participating in numerous protests in Cairo against the government of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF), which took power upon President Hosni Mubarak's abdication in February 2011, and of searching fervidly for the political sources that had allowed the military to prevail over civilian forces. In addition to the tanks and fighter jets, I found some of these sources hidden in a gigantic business empire that the military had clandestinely developed for years. In early 2012 the editor of an online edition of a widely read Egyptian newspaper, a revolutionary female journalist who would later be arrested and detained, invited me to write a series of articles on this business empire, this time using my real name. The first work in decades to be published on this taboo topic, this became the foundation for my later book-length study. As a scholar, this was my humble contribution to an ongoing revolution.

This article advances a new approach based on ‘varieties of capital’ to explain gendered upward mobility in political parties. Research on gender political advancement unduly neglects women delegates to national party congresses. Our work seeks to redress the imbalance by drawing on data gathered from 5,122 questionnaires issued to national party delegates at 20 national conventions that took place between 2004 and 2013 in Italy. To analyse the data we develop a new framework based on ‘varieties of capital’. Our approach builds on Bourdieu's three types of personal capital – economic, social and cultural – and interprets the findings borrowing analytical tools from recent feminist institutional theory, especially the concept of homosocial capital. Comparisons of male and female party delegates in terms of background and their political trajectories reveal the persistence of an uneven playing field, with gendered hierarchies in Italian political parties confirming an international pattern.

In a trio of cases handed down on the same day in 1950, the Supreme Court denied constitutional free speech protection to civil rights picketing and labor picketing. The civil rights case, Hughes v. Superior Court, has often been portrayed as an early test case about affirmative action, but it originated in repression of an alliance of radical labor and civil rights activists exasperated by the legislature's repeated failure to enact fair employment law. Seeking a people's law like the labor general strikers and sit-downers of the 1930s and the civil rights sit-inners of the 1960s, they insisted that the true meaning of free speech was the right to speak truth to power. Courts and Congress forced the labor movement to abandon direct action even as it became the defining feature of the civil rights movement. The free speech rights consciousness they invoked challenged the prevailing conservative conception of rights and law. Direct action was a form of legal argument, a subaltern law of solidarity. It was not, as civil rights protest is often portrayed, a form of civil disobedience. What happened during and after the case reveals how the subaltern law and formal law labor and civil rights began to diverge, along with the legal histories of the movements.

Between the 1870s and the 1910s, municipal court officials in southernmost Mexico recorded contracts regarding small debts and credits in what they labeled libros de conocimientos. While only very rarely citing Mexico's new civil codes of the 1870s and 1880s, the contracts contained in these registers regularly engaged with the kinds of agreements, guarantees, and enforcement mechanisms laid out in the code. They also capture an active, if still elusive, quotidian credit market for the far from well-to-do. This article uses these registers to trace the creation and evolution of Mexico's civil code from the periphery of the country rather than its center. By looking at the ways farmers, smalltime merchants, housewives, and laborers made use of its forms and norms, we can see how liberal economic policy permeated society through use. The determination of everyday people to make good on the protections and possibilities of liberalized fiscal policy cemented that policy in everyday practice.

This paper examines two strands of literature regarding economic models of cooperation. First, payoff transformation theories assume that people may not be exclusively motivated by self-interest, but also care about equality and fairness. Second, team reasoning theorists assume that people might reason from the perspective of the team, rather than an individualistic perspective. Can these two theories be unified? In contrast to the consensus among team reasoning theorists, I argue that team reasoning can be viewed as a particular type of payoff transformation. However, I also demonstrate that many payoff transformations yield actions that team reasoning rules out.