An obscure meeting of elite jurists in Washington could adopt a sweeping change to contract law on Tuesday, binding anyone visiting a website to that business’s terms and conditions, even if they never read them or knew they existed. Those terms could include mandatory arbitration clauses to settle disputes, privacy policies involving the selling of personal data, and virtually anything else a business wanted to throw in. It could even allow companies to change those terms after the fact. These transformations aren’t being debated in the halls of Congress or state legislatures or anywhere in the public square. They would be enacted by the American Law Institute (ALI), a convening of around 4,000 lawyers, law professors, and judges (including every member of the Supreme Court). It’s “the unofficial College of Cardinals of the U.S. legal profession,” said Adam Levitin, a professor at Georgetown Law and a consumer protection expert, who has been a leading...

On Tuesday, Kamala Harris became the first 2020 candidate to call for the full repeal of the Trump tax cuts, taking aim at an unpopular law which delivered a large share of its benefits to the wealthy and corporations. She wants to re-channel revenue from that law into the LIFT Act, a lower- and middle-class tax credit for families making up to $100,000 per year. This trade-out of a regressive tax cut for a progressive tax credit highlights something that every 2020 candidate is going to have to explain. Democratic voters will not expect a Democratic government to stick with a tax code change that has been rightly bashed since its introduction. They’re going to expect candidates who uniformly voted against that bill to call for its repeal. And they’re going to want to know what the candidates plan to do with the proceeds instead. Among other things, this gets so-called big-government liberals out of a familiar box. Harris, in her Tuesday speech in Detroit, sneered at the...