Zephyr Teachout is a Fordham Law School professor and anti-corruption scholar whose work on monopoly and political corruption connects directly to the framework underlying chokepoint-capitalism-book and the-internet-con. She has also run for public office in New York, bringing her academic analysis into direct political practice.
Corruption and anti-corruption scholarship
Teachout's academic specialty is the law of corruption — how it is defined, prosecuted, and how the definition has narrowed in ways that leave the most systemic forms unaddressed. Her 2014 book Corruption in America traces the history of anti-corruption law and argues that the Supreme Court has progressively narrowed the actionable definition of corruption to exclude the most important form: the systemic dependence of politicians and regulators on corporate money.
This argument parallels lawrence-lessig's analysis in Republic, Lost and provides the anti-corruption theory underpinning the chokepoint-capitalism argument. Doctorow and rebecca-giblin's claim that platform monopolies persist because of regulatory capture requires a theory of how that capture operates; Teachout and Lessig supply it. The narrow corruption definition means legislative solutions to platform monopoly face structural obstacles that are themselves a form of the problem.
Antitrust and the neo-Brandeis movement
Teachout has been an active participant in the neo-Brandeisian antitrust revival, publishing Break 'Em Up (2020) as an accessible argument for aggressive antitrust enforcement against tech giants, agricultural monopolies, and financial conglomerates. Break 'Em Up makes the structural antitrust argument for general audiences — comparable in register to the-internet-con and chokepoint-capitalism-book — and explicitly connects monopoly to political corruption, showing how concentrated economic power translates into concentrated political power.
This connection — that monopoly is not only an economic harm but a democratic harm — is central to Doctorow's frame as well. enshittification is ultimately a story about what happens when corporations can externalize costs onto users and workers because they face no competitive discipline and have captured the regulatory process. Teachout's work provides the political economy of why that capture happens.
Political campaigns
Teachout ran for New York Attorney General in 2018 and for Congress in New York's 19th district in 2020, bringing her anti-monopoly analysis into electoral politics. Her campaigns focused on healthcare monopoly, agricultural consolidation, and corporate political power — demonstrating that the neo-Brandeisian analysis had electoral valence beyond academic and policy circles.
Relationship to Doctorow
Teachout and Doctorow are allies in the anti-monopoly coalition. Doctorow has covered her work in pluralistic-blog and positions her analysis — alongside that of lina-khan, matt-stoller, and tim-wu — as the policy infrastructure for the arguments his popular writing is designed to support. The division of labor: Teachout and others make the legal and political science argument; Doctorow makes it legible to a broader public through fiction and accessible nonfiction.