William Milberg Archives - Public Seminar

Labor

Tariffs to Eliminate Forced Labor

Trump’s cynical, ineffective and misguided trade policy

August 27, 2026 • by Thomas Liess and William Milberg

President Trump’s latest effort to impose tariffs on 60 trading partners (collectively accounting for 99.4 percent of US imports) is the use of Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 to tax them for failing “to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with ...

US Tariffs and Trump’s Neopatrimonial Mercantilism

Implications for the United States, China, and the global order

May 21, 2025 • by William Milberg

I have spent decades giving boring lectures on tariffs to graduate students. Suddenly, every other newspaper article is on tariffs. We have to credit President Trump with tapping into the popular disgruntlement with globalization beginning in 2016, leading to a rethinking of the structure of global economic governance and a ...

Public Seminar Review by Dean William Milberg

An Interview by Jeffrey Goldfarb

February 8, 2016 • by Zeyno Ustun

By clicking the red keywords and minutes embedded in the text below, you can watch specific moments of the discussion posted above. At the end of the semester, Fall 2015, our Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldfarb interviewed Dean William Milberg. Together they assessed Public Seminar's good and bad days and how we can ...