Faith in the Constitution is as revolutionary today as it was in 1787.
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Rolling Stone magazine called “Imagine” John Lennon’s musical gift to the world. If so, be sure to keep the receipt.
Hume's subversive radicalism and infidelity make him an unlikely target for today’s iconoclasts, but he stands accused of an unforgivable thoughtcrime.
The Senate majority’s power is accepted as legitimate, even when that majority takes highly partisan actions.
If the US got what it wanted economically, China would likely be a more wily and enduring competitor.
Any effort to restore the American legal tradition must recognize that "individual liberty" decisions have revolutionized our constitutional order.
The DeVos DoE doesn’t understand that systemic racism accusations are an elite institutional tool to both convict and remove yourself from guilt.
The most horrible autocracy is not the one that suppresses resistance, but the one that makes you feel that it is unnecessary to resist.
If we all felt about America as we did not so long ago, there could never be a breakup, but there's little in David French's book about such patriotism.
The post-Goldwater conservative movement changed America’s ideological landscape. Today, that world seems very far away.
The Protectorate paved the way for what later became known as constitutional monarchy.
The words that inspired the abolitionist movement and the words that constitutionalized abolition both came from the extraordinary mind at Monticello.
If addiction is a disease, and nothing else, then the addict is a slave of his biochemistry.
Political order stems human anxiety caused by a primary intuition that existence is out of nothing.
Younger Americans have seen their schools closed, their jobs vanish, and their graduations and transitions to living independently blocked.
A Law & Liberty essay collection on the life and legacy of Justice Antonin Scalia.
One thing is sure: Antonin Scalia is one of the greatest jurists of all time, for all the right reasons.
Scalia offered the first map of a new world, or perhaps more accurately, rediscovered an old map of the world that had been forgotten.
Children of broken and unhealthy families are vastly overrepresented in the prison population.
So long as a studied indifference to the true state of administrative law persists, Leviathan will continue to overcome the rule of law.
Without an imperative to bring precedents into alignment with original meaning, stare decisis becomes the “exception” that swallows the Constitution.
If our constitutional democracy is tolerably functional, occasions for resisting Court rulings will arise relatively infrequently.
To demand that rest and power coexist reflects an act of will, not reason, and a love of power that demands totalizing control over human life.
Is it possible that the Communists are right that economic power will, sooner or later, clothe in amiability the malefactor of great wealth?
The economic policies of the Second World War and our recovery from it present an opportunity for us to see where history rhymes.
Yoo and Posner both engage the same fundamental question: what are the best ways to promote good government and popular government simultaneously?
The prospects for a repeat of the post-World War II experience of falling debt/GDP ratios are poor.
Programs like Boys State can recreate only the game of politics. But that game must be premised on a deeper reality.
Refusing to play in reaction to a news item seems to be very different than what Owens, Robinson, and even Ali did.
Reality having ceased to provide a standard by which to evaluate statements, it is replaced by the speaker, who seeks merely to be true to himself.
A new compilation of an old British debate sheds light on what makes armies safe for liberty.
Original methods originalism embeds the Constitution in the Anglo-American tradition and militates against the abstractions of the French philosophes.
Constitutionalized "disparate impact" doctrine would give judges a universal veto by trussing up woke orthodoxies as fundamental constitutional principles.
At some point in time, the Supreme Court abandoned originalism, and prior originalist precedents, and came up with new law altogether.
Presenting socialism’s rise as the greatest issue in our political life today attributes too much societal sway to this particular "-ism."
McClain’s blindness to the ultimate significance of ultimate truths leads her to miss something no genuine social scientist should miss.
The Unelected addresses a timely subject, and one that is vital to the future of the United States as a constitutional republic.
Good economic arguments do not make the science subordinate to this or that political goal, but help us better understand the riddles of economic life.
As confidence in the desirability of liberal order dwindles throughout much of the world, Huntington’s thesis appears to have come into its own.
Reparations arguments call for the kind of general racial classifications that have not been part of public law or finance since the Jim Crow era.
The most important goal of the leftist project is to use the twin 2020 tragedies to alter the very storyline of America.
Tenet presents the ultimate lesson of tragedy: Desire defeated returns as revenge.
If extraterrestrial sirens beckon, Daniel Deudney makes the case that we ought to tie ourselves to the mast.
The unitary executive is one place where the arguments of originalists and living constitutionalists reinforce one another.
Increasingly, social movements do not allow any neutrality with regard to the causes that they promote.
What mars the modern progressive approach to history is the ultimate hopelessness of the narratives that they are spinning.
In our age of self-righteous secularism, original sin has gone out of fashion, but social sin and political salvation are de rigueur.
Although Steve Bannon certainly played a role in the resurgence of right-wing populism in the U.S., his influence has been overstated.
Originalists must confront the value of legal stability promoted by stare decisis more squarely.
Stasavage puts his thumb on the scales in favor of democracy but misses the possible virtues of autocracy in his comparative theory.
Along with other modern thinkers, Montaigne argues that where there is no truth, there is no law.
Great power conflict is now thinkable, and in great measure because of lessons unlearned from World War II.
Perhaps Michael Moore & Co. believe that Planet of the Humans will be a call to the faithful toward a more ascetic form of eco-worship.
The rise of secularism concealed the medieval theological foundations of international order, but did not destroy them.
The Constitution is a framework to facilitate and indeed constitute ordinary popular politics, not something to be transformed by that politics.
The Court's dichotomy between the individual and the state misses much of the richness of social life. But is it a practical necessity?
Even if you produce good ideas, bad salesmen have almost limitless capacity to ensure no one is tempted to buy.
It's worth remembering that during and immediately following World War II the United States and its allies were far less liberal than they are today.
COVID-19 has been highly disruptive to the human social relations that Adam Smith identified as central to human nature.
The fact that America no longer needs to play policeman in the Persian Gulf compels the Gulf states to act responsibly as a matter of self-preservation.
We could be on the cusp of seeing just how fragile and illogical the higher-ed business model is.
The world is not going back to the 20th century, but our liberals have never really moved past those halcyon days when they had run of the world.
Washington’s objectives in cabinet management had less to do with managing diverse personalities and more to do with preserving political coherence.
Stephen Williams wrote about a man who lived in dark times and tried to build the institutions of liberal democracy on the ruins of an autocratic regime.
Why Hamilton is the musical for our time.
The purpose of cant is either to present the person who utters it as morally superior to others or to himself as he really is, or to shut other people up.
Most defenders of originalism agree with Vermeule that originalism needs a justification outside of itself.
We can judge the free society to be the best society because it most fully satisfies the social suite of our evolved human nature.
Coming Home shows that America suffers not from homesickness but homelessness—the alienation of a people from its true self.
Recovery of national purpose and renewed international commitment will require spiritual arguments and energy.
The American public’s current skepticism derives from the belief that experts are abusing the deference their expertise is due.
If Christianity has influenced thinking about law, exactly how has that influence worked?
Underpinning current arguments against the filibuster is the implicit desire to do away with politics inside the Senate altogether.
For Thomas, the Constitution facilitates personal responsibility and well-ordered families which are the conditions of a flourishing community.
The NRA has come to symbolize the Left’s hatred of guns, Donald Trump, and the “deplorables” they imagine comprise NRA members.
In a world struggling to emerge from years of conflict against fascism, readers flocked to The Plague to understand what they had been through.
Mises matters today because his method enables far more than a utilitarian calculation of the whole in building a just society.
Is it really correct to say that the Reagan era is the crucial period that consolidated the movements of the 1960s?
Public sector unions are exacerbating our criminal justice crisis and making it much harder to educate the next generation during the coronavirus pandemic.
The trouble with experts is that intellectuals have a tendency to convince themselves that mastery of one subject entails mastery of all.
Will the zealous pursuit of equal group outcomes over individual rewards erode our prosperity, prowess, effectiveness, and international competitiveness?
Despite our crises, the world is remarkably better off than in 1919, or in 1939.
Remembering a brilliant jurist, scholar of Russian history, and friend.
A reasonable approach to history requires a certain sophistication, that is to say, an ability to hold in the mind more than one thought at a time.
On almost every page of Tankersley's book, the villain—with its own organic intelligence compelling its operation—is "the economy."
The Court's inconsistencies may be a function of the peculiarities of our political system, not the peculiarities of particular justices.
Murray means to deepen American political truths with a comprehensive sense of the ideas, laws, and institutions that made America possible.
Going into the past in search of wrongs could lead to the discovery of innumerable injustices that conceivably demand contemporary rectification.
Lincoln prudently acted on the moral principle that slavery and its expansion was wrong and violated American principles of self-government.
If Chiafalo is the best that originalists can do, that is a damning indictment.
Local leaders across the nation, many elected with handsome majorities, have been shown feckless in the face of mobs raging through their cities.
Richard Ellis shows that there was much more to the 1840 presidential contest than hard cider and log cabins.
Conservatives should recognize that our embrace of the very constitutional vices the Anti-Federalists warned about has made our Republic one in name only.
As progressives understand better than most people, if you win the vision game, you likely win everything else.
We confront a crisis of constitutional misunderstandings—fundamental misunderstandings among much of the legal left; partial misunderstandings by others.
Seila Law reveals the need to find a better legal foundation for the modern administrative state, one that works within the separation of powers.
The goods of human dignity, human rights, and human liberty can be secured only by a transcendent source and an ontological grounding.
The difficulty with the reparations argument has always been practical, not moral. It lies in the questions, by whom? to whom? and how much?
What lessons should we recall after seventy-five years in the shadow of World War II?
Without taking into consideration a metaphysical make-up of human beings and the world that surrounds them, comprehending political life will be difficult.
How the effort to cancel Hamilton actually cancels the possibility of life together.
Competitive labor markets remain far better at generating value for both employers and employees.
The ideological discourse of the communist regime always demanded a certain “contextualization” that blinded one from the particular and the concrete.
Property rights and the neutral rule of law have done far more to sustain innovation and raise living standards than any government social program.
Men are not billiard balls whose direction is determined in a purely mechanistic way by the impact of a few physical forces.
Wordsworth's was a prophetic voice, but one that, through the medium of poetry, celebrated meekness, kindliness, graciousness, and compassion.
One might be forgiven for thinking that today’s Republican Party is an American Christian Democratic party in everything but name only.
Gregory Collins has written the definitive account of Burke’s economic thought.
Sean Shelby announced as President & CEO of Liberty Fund.
What if the “self” that is “realized” under the conditions of liberal capitalism is a self that despises liberal capitalism?
Our deepest official lie is that the line between good and evil runs through sexes, classes, and races—not through every human heart.
Williamson sets out how the British social democratic tradition focused on achieving significant economic equality and (close to) full employment.
The Framers, very cognizant of history, sought to frame a constitution that successfully balanced self-government and liberty.
Sheridan wants to teach by tragedy, so his protagonists are essentially honorable, which is no longer tolerated in our storytelling.
Increasing the efficiency of criminal record-keeping gives the state greater ability to control its citizens.
Dante’s Bones tells a fascinating story about the afterlife of a brilliant artist. But it also reveals how political figures distorted his legacy.
The United States ultimately won the Cold War because we had a more prosperous and otherwise attractive society than the Soviet Union.
A peculiar aspect of our nation’s lockdowns and mandatory safety precautions is that they have been imposed on everyone, irrespective of age.
In the real world, the wage offered by the employer is merely the employer’s first move in a game of “higgling,” with the worker at a disadvantage.
The development of American politics can be understood as a centuries-long grappling with two competing but equally essential conceptions of "the people."
According to We Built Reality, economists with their dark magic of supply and demand curves have bewitched academia—and the world.
The 1988 campaign was a capstone for long-running changes to the postwar GOP, and its campaign themes would reverberate into the future.
The dignity of work is a theme that unites overlapping strands of nationalists and free-marketeers, just as it was in the Scottish Enlightenment.
In face of uncertainty, there is no wonder that some projects only move forward if the government is willing to subsidize them.
Today, it does not suffice tell people they have souls, they must come to believe it by certain experience—and Christopher Nolan offers this.
Kelton offers an alternative to orthodox monetary theory, but it is an alternative with even more conceptual deficits.
As appealing as Confucian thought is, it works better as theory than in the messy reality of power and competing interests and human longings.
Nothing is more essential to our nation than that we sustain schools that will compete against the monolithically left-liberal educational establishment.
As with all sins, racism will never end without God’s grace and a willingness by all to conduct themselves with charity.
A healthy polity cannot exist without a viable middle class, and unions can't help recreate one.
The failure to maintain a connection to what is best in the Western tradition could prove devastating to what’s left of our constitutional order.
The constitutional reasonability of today’s requirements are more constitutionally doubtful than many believe.
It is not hard to see that the modern presidency bears no resemblance to the Hamiltonian presidency exemplified by Washington.
Kevin C. O'Leary offers his readers a defamatory revisionism that unintentionally sheds light on how we got here.
The win for Little Sisters of the Poor isn't the nightmare the media describes. But in another way, it does point to a dysfunctional constitutional order.
It shows moral arrogance to pass a breathtakingly severe judgment on your forebears and fail to imagine that your descendants won't do the same to you.
Deaths of despair are related to questions of meaning and the psychological conditions for social malaise.
Wednesday’s ruling was a significant and welcome re-affirmation of a principle that, we should hope, is firmly entrenched in American constitutional law.
Dictators used sycophantic biographers, influential artists, and press agents to spread their cults and create the illusion of invincibility.
For shallow souls who never experience the virtue that grows out of inner turbulence, Dylan’s confession may be inscrutable.
No polity, whether Israel or America, will be healthy if it blurs together God and nation.
The Court has moved the legislative power beyond the realm of mindful decision-making altogether.
We have lost the notion of what it means to be a philosopher by confusing it with the job, the work of being a professor of philosophy.
The ancients show us that when mutual agreement on the meaning of concepts like liberty starts to break down, there will likely be conflict.
When Roberts has an ideological or jurisprudential position to impress into law, he is likely to wait for the time at which it is politically palatable.
In Espinoza, the Court elevates a principle that finds no mention in the text of the Constitution.
“Religion as psychology” may have something to offer the secular man, which could improve religion’s relationship with secular society.
Growing conservative interest in new models of labor organization must likewise be suppressed, it seems, lest they prove too successful.
The most perceptive presidents have recognized that America’s foreign policy leadership relies on perfecting its own domestic society.
How ought we to remember those who achieved greatness?
Fish contends that free speech as a concept must be “flexible” and “malleable” in order to allow for its application in a variety of real-world situations.
No strictly political community brings political salvation.
Revolutionary community takes on properties of war, politics, and religion with the goal of total transformation of society.
Right-wing radio broadcasters were a crucial, but now mostly forgotten, element of the Republican Party’s rise in the South.
Irrationality offers all manner of human peculiarities and follies but no clarity on the exact attributes making something irrational.
What happens when an author writes brilliantly but seems utterly unaware of his prejudices?
The Emancipation Memorial's depiction of Archer Alexander is powerful not just for his physicality but because he has the force of right behind him.
Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan is not the only politician in the United States of America who appears to be operating in a trance.
In 2020, a famous novelist offering a tale about love in the midst of disaster is a prophet of hope
Where ought the life of the mind lead us?
The life of the mind needs firm anchors lest it become unmoored from reason and prudence.
Hitz reminds us of a way out of the dark woods we find ourselves in, a journey that draws us upwards and out of our isolated selves.
The liberal arts are valuable only insofar as they are transformative, redemptive, and central to human flourishing.
Roberts' view is that stare decisis only incorporates results, not the reasoning necessary to arrive at those results.
How America's Political Parties Change represents the culmination of Michael Barone’s 60 years of experience examining American elections.
There is no social engineering plan or national industrial policy that can solve the problems of individualism and weak communities.
The renewed debate over the value of labor unions on the right forgets some hard-won truths.
In The Monk, Matthew Lewis used the Gothic form first to convey the temptation to mob violence before illuminating its horrors.
Vocation’s lost meaning is the real mystery.
Nobody alive started this problem; it is rooted in old, ancestral sins.
For Piketty, the Hayekian turn in the 1980s was a long planned ideological triumph, but his narrative omits certain crucial details.
The modern antitrust regime is more than capable of adapting to new realities in the economy.
Jefferson remains indispensable to the American story, the wordsmith of our most noble ideals and symbol of our most awful paradoxes.
More than the Bostock decision itself, structural defects in legal conservatism spell trouble for its future as a cohesive movement.
The difficulty is that APA originalism runs up against the constitutionalist position at every turn.
Reilly not only vindicates the founders, he provides arguments that are so strong that a competent grand jury would not even allow the case to go to trial.
A one-size-fits-all, centralized, bureaucratic service provider for all city services simply cannot satisfy the demands of citizens in many areas.
Many have mistaken their own outrage for virtue, and then supposed that their virtue absolved them from the necessity to think clearly.
William Lloyd Garrison’s legendary critique of the Constitution is really just a critique of the Constitution as interpreted by the Taney Court circa 1842.
Mr. Jones shows that a caricature of life, once enacted, turns deadly.
More than people realize, faculties are clubs that tend to self-replicate.
What lessons remain eighty years after France's collapse in the face of the German onslaught?
Anyone who sits on the vast spectrum from the liberal-minded left through to conservative traditionalists should have no illusions about the woke.
Interpretation remains a humanistic enterprise, not a purely technical or mechanistic one. There will be errors.
The substitution of “equity” for “equality” has serious consequences.
In Bostock, Gorsuch reaches the semi-mystical conclusion that any word or concept having to do with “sex” may constitute “sex discrimination."
A more appropriate intellectual foundation would imply less, not more, antitrust action.
Why Glenn Loury offers essential conservative reading on mass incarceration, crime, and human development.
People can survive roads with potholes and even live without an education, but as Locke showed, they will always need police and a system of justice.
Even with (literally) a lifetime of experience under our belts, human beings are not fully transparent—even to ourselves.
Bacevich's conservative ecosystem, rich and varied as it is, contains many an invasive liberal species.
Attempting to portray the quintessential judicial activist as a victim of political skullduggery is like putting lipstick on a pig.
Using the chapters in this new book as lamps and signposts, Bailyn has created an elegant roadmap of his intellectual journey.
Jeff Broadwater offers an account of Jefferson and Madison that highlights their friendship and influence over the Constitution.
Eastwood has dedicated himself to the restoration of the dignity of patriotism through the portrayal of American heroes.
Cold War theorists reconfigured democracy as an instrumental device used to secure private goods, with consequences that echo today.
Eighty years ago, France suffered perhaps the greatest humiliation in its history, and de Gaulle rallied the nation to continue the fight.
Charged with a duty to apprehend offenders, police officers must be prepared to use force. Armed confrontations in these circumstances are inevitable.
Without the neutral principles of the liberal order, politics becomes all about acquiring power to protect your side from the other.
Pretending there is no competition problem in the tech sector could ironically hasten the demise of antitrust’s consumer-welfare standard.
Law & Liberty contributors offer their reading and listening recommendations for your summer vacations (or staycations) in this crisis.
Talking, finger-pointing, and apologizing will not advance racial justice unless we stop insisting that we are unalterably different because of our race.
Busybullies use their influence, which thrives on an inflated sense of moral superiority, to have the state tell others what they can and cannot do.
Americans have always set great stock on authentic religious experience, and this priority has often pressed institutional religion to the margins.
Do we want a presidency that aligns with our founding vision? If so, will we give up temporary policy gains in favor of long-term constitutional fidelity?
Mike Gonzalez lifts the lid on a half-century old New Left march through the country’s elite institutions.
Joel Kotkin argues that a new class of rulers want to boot and spur contemporary serfs and replace liberalism with an enlightened justice and conformity.
Basic Symbols offers a counterpoint to the commitment to individual rights and equality that so many take as the essence of Americanism.
Decouple the language of rights from their theological foundation and rights become mere assertions.
It is impossible to expunge from the human mind the idea that punishment is the correct response to wrongdoing.
There is an established genre of attacks on the Constitution arising from its failure to produce certain policies at a given moment.
Fight House should be read by anyone aspiring to public service—at least as a warning shot across the bow.
A new book offers compelling evidence that whatever its errors or missteps, liberal anti-communism got it mostly right.
Nussbaum exhibits a clear desire to steer clear of Christianity’s contributions to our understanding of dignity.
Racism is truly opposed not by anti-racists, but by non-racists, that is, people who do not judge or behave towards others according to their race.
The University of California decides to phase out the SAT and ACT, and abandons the idea of merit.
We cannot restore civil peace without a reasonable promise of happiness.
The Great Reversal argues that the EU learned the lessons of 20th-century market successes better than the US did.
Clever rulers such as Frederick the Great, for example, have studied Machiavelli's works assiduously and denounced them vehemently.
Neo-Brandeisian jurisprudence places an unaccountable judiciary at the commanding heights of the economy, subordinating the market to the state.
Pinochet would be celebrated if his accomplishments had not been realized by a regime which had deployed savage methods against its opponents.
Astrology, like statistical modeling today, drew on often impenetrable jargon, sustaining the exclusivity of those who practiced it.
Under these circumstances, it is imperative to err on the side of life.
We ceded so much of our children’s lives to the Department of Education and the Department of Everything-Else that we forgot what responsibility felt like.
Changes in usage and semantics, when imposed, are usually exercises in power.
Antifa seeks to overthrow “the privileged” and they assume that this violence and destruction will inflame an uprising that will usher in a pure democracy.
COVID-19 threatens to become the precipitating event that reshapes the way we think about work, commuting, and urban living.
The Exodus story is about the creation of a society capable of withstanding the eventual decline that comes with affluence over many generations.
More democracy is not always the best solution to the problems of democracy, but in the case of a pandemic, it may be our best hope of reasoned action.
The British National Health Service has spoken: Wear the badge or declare yourself to be a bigot.
To preserve our federalism the national government must refrain from paying for the past and present fiscal mismanagement by state governments.
The authors of Reconstructing Democracy support some level of popular control, but seem unaware of their own refined condescension.
As Schlafly amply illustrated, polarization can be a potent political weapon.
Leadership cannot be emulated or explained to details; it is a paradigm, and it is fluid.
The Cost of Loyalty claims without proof that the military controls American life, and that the academies control the military.
Reality is too rich to allow itself to be perfectly captured in any rendering, model, or experiment.
If all political history is simply a contest between Christian and anti-Christian ideas, everything is a battleground.
David Pryce-Jones's Signatures reminds us of a more dire and serious age but also of one in some ways more genuinely human than our own.
There would be no “social” in Europe’s “social market economy” without the strictly market-friendly rules essential for economic efficiency.
Making antitrust great again in order to chasten Big Tech requires using theories that were abandoned for good reason.
With COVID-related spending exacerbating state finances, we may be in for a major development of Eleventh Amendment doctrine.
Barry Gewen has written the most thoughtful book on Kissinger we have, offering the most accurate, fair assessment of his policy intentions.
Although elite liberalism suddenly hates him very publicly, Allen had no idea the knives would come out for him.
If we focus exclusively on the risks we are most concerned about, we can miss the other risks that obtain should our demands be met.
Socialism cannot discover what freedom is and it cannot address the social question.
Fifteen years after the Muhammad Cartoon Controversy, the underlying tension surrounding free speech is still present in Danish society.
Nick Ripatrazone engages with novelists for whom faith is a pilgrimage, not a place.
The Warren Court brought on the partisan confirmation battle over Abe Fortas by intentionally making constitutional law a political affair.
Inviting judges to consider the consequences of their decisions or recent practice as guides to interpretation threatens to bury originalism.
No conceivable variety of liberalism can overcome the problem of religious liberty alone—but natural law offers hope for managing the challenge.
Murray’s book is directed against the modern orthodoxy that all differences in wealth and power arise by the exercise of privilege and illicit influence.
It's just not as easy as it once was to be a favor-trading ward heeler.
Douglass was a more complex figure and a more interesting political thinker than contemporary attempts to appropriate him might suggest.
Both Bosch's waking and sleeping moments are haunted by the victims whose murders have not been solved.
Tomáš Halík's memoir is also the story of a people enduring difficulties and eventually ascending spiritually and peacefully as a free people.
To treat our present political dysfunction, we must revive politics, which means we must rescue the public realm from obscurity.
Great men prove what we are capable of, but they also prove that institutions are not by themselves enough.
Földényi explodes the usual temptation to feel self-sufficient, relying on a kind of technological omnipotence that is like a globe-shaped Tower of Babel.
The essays in this collection provide excellent reasons for offering substantial protection to what many founders called “the sacred right of conscience.”
What should business schools teach their students about life and liberty?
It might seem that the higher the tech, the lower the need to understand anything other than business, or perhaps engineering, but that’s hardly the case.
To achieve reform, it will not work simply to stuff in courses that come out of the English department’s current offerings and call it a day.
To become an honorable businessperson, then, requires not only technical training, but also an understanding of what the purpose of business is.
Does the text of the Free Exercise Clause justify special judicial scrutiny of laws burdening religious freedom?
While there is considerable flexibility for evolution in the presidential selection system, that flexibility has its limits—the electors must elect.
The Capital is both a lampoon of the EU's bureaucratic pathologies and a backhanded slap at a primary cause of its friction: national attachments.
At certain moments, Ornstein almost seems to yearn for a world in which boys are given the moral formation they need to forge lasting, intimate bonds.
Considering two Roman legal maxims may help us navigate the crisis which has resulted from the coronavirus pandemic.
New Title IX rules create barriers against the pressures of students, the enthusiasm of Title IX bureaucrats, and the pusillanimity of campus officials.
A new book challenges our understanding of the relationship between free trade and empire in the age of revolutions.
The greatest problem in the Middle East is a deformed understanding of reason and will that has produced a dysfunctional culture.
Sanders’ “democratic socialism” seems more like an attempt at realignment rather than a move toward revolution.
Why do socialists ignore the one story in Scripture that depicts real socialism?
Davis has helped to expose the contradiction in modern therapy, the juxtaposition of the biological with the purely psychological.
Capitalism has brought greater economic wealth and cultural freedom to more people than any other system in the history of man.
When will social distancing end? The unfortunate truth is that we were already socially distant, and we were already suffering for it.
Two new books carry Abraham Lincoln across the country and toward apotheosis.
We might think that we’ve followed all the rules but still wonder whether something more is wanted of us. The moral life is more than the rule-driven life.
Rakove and Sheehan are to be commended for putting together a volume that reminds us what a faithful companion Publius remains.
Election Meltdown may tell us more about the meltdown of the liberal mind than the meltdown of our elections.
We’re all in a maudlin mood: we should use it to think about what really matters.
If the liberal arts teach us anything over time, they teach us that those who love the liberal arts fully will suffer.
The talents that have been formed in you will serve the world’s needs that call loudest to you.
Every generation is born into a world it didn’t make, into a mess of which it was not the author.
No, it’s not just you. We’re all—nation-states included—in over our heads.
Law & Liberty contributors offer some thoughts for the graduating class of 2020.
As much as is possible, natural law should be confined to legal procedure, to what Fuller called the internal morality of the law.
There is much to learn from Pippin, but there is more to learn from Aristotle—first of all, to take the plot seriously.
We can enjoy the heady experience of what it must have been like to reflect upon politics with a teacher who continues to instruct long after his death.
If we are to have some hope of recovery rather than civil surrender to identity politics, we must rely on tools beyond civil discourse.
Janet Nelson has crafted a life of Charles the Great that relentlessly examines his life, and captures the energy he brought to rule.
Never Trump beautifully captures how each group of Trump-averse Republican intellectuals is unhappy in its own way.
Grounding politics in “religion,” does not solve any of the problems Buckley identifies in the natural law, it just pushes them further down the road.
Hume's observation on natural law does not show that there is or must be an unbridgeable gap between what is and what ought to be.
Buckley proposes replacing natural law with a radical ethical voluntarism that make good and evil wholly arbitrary.
Pascal said that he who sets out to be an angel ends a beast: to which we might add that he who sets out to create a heaven-on-earth creates a hell.
In the small but somewhat potent mix of bourgeois socialists, there is only room for the conservation and propagation of ideology.
Now more than ever, we are reminded why vibrant, small-scale agriculture is so vital, not only to our national food supply, but to our national character.
Our paradigms for dealing with pandemics may need to change in profound ways in the future.
If the most powerful and well-connected can be victimized by lawfare, what hope would ordinary citizens have against a vindictive prosecution?
Churches’ opposition to state-ordered closings seems to turn, not on the particulars of worship itself, but on attitudes about hierarchy and government.
Permanent Record is a crisp and surprisingly readable narrative, if one that should be consumed with a grain or even a tablespoon of salt.
Individual virtue is not the only justified claim to rule or share in rule, and it would be a most unusual city that was ruled by the virtuous simply.
Neo-integralists today lack formation in republican institutions, and succumb too easily to the lure of authoritarianism.
Why Walker Percy's theory of hurricanes doesn't apply to COVID-19.
Berman believes that Europe’s post-war democratization reflects many lessons learned from the continent’s bloody first 50 years of the twentieth century.
In the twentieth century, the legislative powers of Congress became essentially unlimited. Is the Congressional subpoena power likewise unlimited?
If you want to cause real change in American politics, hitting the streets is one of your better choices.
The new versions of Star Trek and Star Wars have rejected, but not refuted, the hopes they once entertained.
Hope is not so much about what will be; rather it is anchored in the ideals of the present and even the past.
As Ratzinger astutely notes, European elites have recognized the economic failure of Marxism without perceiving its moral and philosophic failings.
Blanket, categorical rules can be both inefficient and self-defeating, as decision-makers lack the knowledge to understand their secondary consequences.
American Muslims, by creating organizations and assuming leadership within their communities, reinforce the United States’ identity as a religious nation.
The American originalist is resolutely uninterested in other countries, even those that are just as free and committed to the rule of law.
Today’s “socialist” turn reflects a desperate desire to stop the clock—and a wounded recognition that the hands will keep on spinning.
For some contemporary criminal justice reformers, devotion to ideology leads to illogical conclusions about human nature and character change.
How the Old World Ended looks beyond how industrialization began to consider what made the way of life it displaced so vulnerable to disruption.
If much of T.S. Eliot's work expresses a tragic sense of cosmic homelessness, just as much anticipates a reconciliation with our origins.
While Blackstone was a source for many, it was definitely not the only or even most important source the drafters of the Declaration had in mind.
One judge’s arbitrary legislation is another judge’s legitimate public purpose.
Public adulation often deliberately confounds the NHS itself with the devotion and skill of the people working within it.
While parroting the left-wing rhetoric of equality, the figures profiled by Schweizer used their power to protect their positions and make lots of money.
Rather than a threatening, extremist force, Dueck takes nationalism as an established phenomenon with roots in the Founding era.
Proper judging requires the application of the law, and fortunate is the judge who has mainly good law to apply.
We should contemplate American socialism’s fate: it deepens individualism and statism, and is not the rival but the patsy of state capitalism.
That we celebrate foreign labor in medicine but condemn the importation of fruit pickers offers a peculiar inconsistency.
Embracing originalism is not the only response that progressives might make to conservative nonoriginalism, but there are reasons to think they might.
Patterson’s response inadvertently affirms what liberalism’s Schmittian critics contend.
If history teaches us anything, it is that acting like “everything is up for grabs” is precisely what produces reigns of terror.
Conservatives needed to figure out what they are for before we can think of patching anything up.
Trump could emulate the actions of General Washington by accepting limited risks for some in order to protect the nation from more extensive ones.
Technological progress will not maximize learning if our educational institutions are mired in an ideology that prevents full use of the tools.
In the absence of a national consensus, states are likely to continue taking the lead in enacting policies aligned with the preferences of their residents.
The social nature and needs of human beings will draw us back to work—not just because we have to but because we will be aching to.
If you listen to Democrats and their cheerleaders in the mainstream media, their leaders are just plain smarter and more caring.
It is not without some justice that Cato's death is counted as coincident with the death of the Roman Republic.
Either implicitly or explicitly, originalists make a normative claim about the superiority of the American constitution.
Prudence—that ability to see dimly through the fog that envelops political life—combines humility with the decisiveness that statesmanship requires.
Liberal education exists to help us become more truly ourselves, but it begins with the assumption that we do not yet know who we are.
The National Popular Vote movement reflects a shocking failure to understand the consequences that would ensue should such a system go into effect.
With the collapse of libertarianism, we await a restatement of conservatism for our times, shorn of aprioristic theories of natural law.
Petrilli and Finn answer the question, what is the purpose of public education? It is for promoting character and for preparing informed citizens.
The American Founding contained Aristotelian elements of natural right—especially concerning property—that insulated it from modernity's corrosive effects.
The natural intuition is to think that federalism works in normal times and then gets in the way of prompt, effective responses to crises.
Just as Chevron was an iconic decision marking the rise of the administrative state, so its relative decline is also a powerful symbol.
Integralism is an internet aesthetic of mostly young men alienated from the public life and consumed with the libido dominandi.
Conservatives need not look any farther than their backyard for a common ground guarded by Russell Kirk, F. A. Hayek, Richard Weaver, and Milton Friedman.
The Times editorial board seeks to reorder American life along certain lines supposedly more in keeping with democracy and material equality.
It may be that some human motivations that affect politics cannot themselves be captured by, or reduced to, politics.
Passing off convenient faux-interpretations with a wink and a smirk is a short-term remedy with a long-term cost to political culture.
Democracy may be superior to authoritarianism, but that does not guarantee that every democracy will prevail over every autocracy.
When I look back on my own life, I think I knew by the age of ten that one should not strangle old ladies in their beds.
Is it really in America’s long-term economic interest to disengage from a market of 1.4 billion people and one of the world's largest economies?
There are some who believe that certain types of crime are so heinous that the normal safeguards against false conviction can, indeed must, be abrogated.
The premise on which originalism rests is simple: judges should apply the law as written because otherwise they’re not actually applying law.
Doesn’t Scalia’s originalism allow for just the kind of moral principle that Vermeule supports?