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Nearly a quarter of all workers in the United States are currently in a job that requires an occupational license. As the prevalence of occupational licensing has grown, so have claims that its overuse is causing increased consumer costs and impairing labor mobility and economic freedom. To address these concerns, many policymakers and academics argue that licensing restrictions should be more closely tailored to the goal of protecting the public from harm and that, to guard against capture, practitioners should not regulate their own licensing. Federal courts, in turn, have drawn on this vision of the proper role of occupational licensing to significantly limit when and how licensing can be used through their interpretation of antitrust law and the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution. This Article takes a step back to argue that these critiques of occupational licensing, and the federal jurisprudence based on them, embrace a narrow view of the role of licensing in the economy that is grounded in both an embrace of economic libertarianism and an antagonism towards professional self-regulation. While this view generally recognizes licensing as justified to protect the public from harm in limited situations, it disregards a range of other values that occupational licensing has historically been viewed to promote. This Article draws on social science literature to categorize these other justifications as (1) fostering communities of knowledge and competence; (2) developing relationships of trust; and (3) buffering producers from the market. The Article uses specific examples from the judiciary's occupational licensing jurisprudence to show how acknowledging this broader set of justifications should constrain the courts from imposing a narrow view of licensing's role in the economy. It ends by suggesting that if the federal government is to shape occupational licensing policy, Congress and the Executive are better placed than the judiciary to take the lead.

Videogames matter and they matter for international politics. With popular culture increasingly acknowledged as a valuable site for opening up new ways of interrogating theory, this article argues that important insights for the critical understanding of American exceptionalism can be developed through the study of military videogames. At one level, military videogames illustrate a number of prominent themes within American exceptionalism: they offer the perception that a threatening and hostile environment confronts the USA, thus situating America as an innocent victim, justified in using force in response; they allow exploration of the link between American exceptionalism and debates on the competence of political leadership, and they open up space to analyse the temporal dimension of international relations. Yet videogames also help expose the foundations (what Weber terms 'the myths') upon which American exceptionalism is based, here shown to be centred on the importance of the military industrial complex as a source of exceptionalism.