Wolfram Eilenberger's surprise bestseller explores the lives and thought of four eminent German philosophers.
Greg Lukianoff
Children represent hope, and people without hope are not going to be bribed into having children.
Somewhere Colin Kaepernick, whether you love him or hate him, is laughing all the way to the bank.
The ascendancy of the harm principle in American law has led to contested ideas of harm that match the moral and political views of the person making them.
In Art and Faith, Makoto Fujimura considers how creativity offers a path out of our culture's destructive tendencies toward pragmatism.
By forbidding CSS from placing children in foster homes, Philadelphia quashes any vestiges of reasonable pluralism on the meaning of marriage.
The conflict over the bonds of salvation would lead to secession in the events of the Civil War.
Tocqueville refused to idolize a “democratic” social and political ethic that was always tempted to say adieu to political and moral greatness.
Founding God's Nation shows that Exodus is not merely a story of "national liberation, political founding, and decent interpersonal morality."
We must re-train our ears to hear what social justice ideology peddles.
Early Biden initiatives give regulators free rein and a heavy hand, reversing recent progress in curbing administrative power.
In Gerwarth's hopeful narrative, the fates have not issued their verdict, judgements have not been rendered, nor the scales tipped in favor of evil.
Young people need to learn to live within their bodies, and this is clearly a real struggle for 21st century humans.
The Shah exercised power as a true autocrat, and Iran came to have two poles: sycophancy and plotting against him.
Increases going forward would be consistent with history.
People insist on investing militants—some of them—with romance.
Are we to abridge the Constitution, shear off its meaning, edit it down, whenever applying it faithfully calls for a “value judgment”?
The father of “fusionism” still has much to teach conservatives entering the wilderness.
Liberty Fund's Education in a Free Society offers a look at the promise and perils of American higher education.
You can’t have a decent politics without a decent culture, and you can’t have culture without cult.
Americans from diverse backgrounds and across the generations have found that the story of Esther speaks to their moment.
Glenn Arbery’s Boundaries of Eden extends the tradition of the Southern novel without allowing his historical fiction to sacrifice real history.
It is easy to forget that the Cold War was a time when government strategy involved novels, poetry, and literary criticism—and writers mattered.
America has gone through times so difficult that even its Founders were despondent, but it emerged still standing. Should we take heart?
If America’s Constitution needs its own “Bible,” you could do much worse than The Federalist. But Gary Gregg and Aaron Coleman do us one better.
One of the most successful parody accounts on Twitter, Andrew Doyle’s invention offers a picture of intersectional activism’s most deranged impulses.
There is a growing need to rein in the political excesses of the public sector, both in long suffering areas and in newer abuses of unionization.
Embracing stakeholder capitalism on a global scale would only magnify the already-yawning gap between Davos man and everyone else.
Education activists are now associating standards of good writing with “white supremacy.” This is a truly racist claim.
The claim that the United States is baked through with oppression always looks to origins, and this takes us down a dangerous path.
The question is not about consensus or disagreement but about the nature of law and the moral premises undergirding a regime marked by the rule of law.
Recently, there has emerged a wholly unanticipated enforcement of Title IX—this time benefiting men.
Citizens are to be respected as equals, and this demands we treat public opinion with the respect it deserves.
Lasch put his finger on much of what ails American democracy, but we need something more.
Taylor believed the rhetoric of economic and national greatness—"borrowed from the fallacious European theories" of empire—was deadly to a republic.
Sigrid Undset's classic novel shows us now what we want to see but what we’ve been neglecting, the consequences of our autonomous ways.
The early state declarations of rights should not be read and studied merely as “dress rehearsals” for the national Bill of Rights.
We have the resources, the talented people, and the entrepreneurial spirit to defeat Communist China in this soft war, but do we have the will?
In order to achieve primacy, the leftist mythology requires that the pantheon of American heroes be dethroned.
The proposed minimum wage hike flies in the face of both economic theory and empirics. It is an offense against principle, equity, and knowledge.
Moderates like Buttigieg are forced to walk the line today, endlessly striving to hit the sweet spot between “inflammatory” and “milquetoast.”
We should remember that the elites Lasch so despised remain Americans at heart.
Video games are an art form, and cultural critics on the right ought to take note of this powerful medium.
In America's past year of violence, we have witnessed something like a microcosm of the chaotic situation that existed in Russia in 1917.
Scotland’s Justice Secretary, Humza Yousaf, insists that policing expression — public, online, or even at private parties — is necessary to stamp out hate.
The Pilgrims were not 21st century liberal democrats, but they embraced institutions and practices that helped advance a commitment to republicanism.
Will America cross over to antiracism and all its works?
Marshall's greatness is the product of his belief in the now-unfashionable presupposition that there are right answers to legal questions.
A study of the French Revolution cannot possibly succeed if it does not address the role of ideas in that extraordinary, cataclysmic event.
Originalists and historians should not be in conflict, so why is fruitful collaboration so rare?
A student is not an empty vessel. To find wisdom, or perhaps to be found by wisdom, it is necessary to be actively engaged in its pursuit.
An Apologia pro Sua Vita: A defense of why I've tried to summon my wit over the years to shape a jurisprudence of natural law.
Lasch did not think that 21st century populism could resemble the new right or populist movements of the past.
Less than a year after the decision was issued, the “major initiative” represented by Bostock has guaranteed the inevitable consequences.
Becket’s life shows that self-government requires the governing of one's self. The freedom of institutions to form individuals is crucial to that end.
Five Law & Liberty contributors offer their thoughts on where the Right ought to go next.
Character matters—yes, even if those of poor character are capable of bringing about positive change.
Conservatism has hope because many ordinary people are still proud to be patriots, and some remain stalwart people of faith.
Machiavelli is famous as a teacher of political realism, and his teaching is indispensable even for those who are not themselves Machiavellians.
Trump’s emergence vividly illustrated the vast distance between the ideas of American conservatism and the politics on the ground.
Recent years made it clear that we were being governed by a corrupt oligarchy out of tune with traditional American political norms.
Is America finally making its own way in a world becoming less liberal and in which the West’s saliency as a model for everyone continues to decline?
The last word is no longer with the campus Title IX office, or the Oval Office, but is instead with controlling federal appellate authority.
California's new Ethnic Studies curriculum is a system of indoctrination grounded in unintelligibility.
The British criminal justice system has perfected the bureaucratic instrument which creates work and avoids it at the same time.
The World of Plymouth Plantation seeks to break away from the symbolic value of Plymouth, but in doing so overlooks the human actions and goals.
Deutschland 89 reminds us that freedom is not for the faint of heart.
Dear Comrades! dramatizes the emotional and personal costs that millions paid for their belief in communism.
Too often we would rather use the past to confirm what we believe to be right and good than to do the work of personal and national self-understanding.
The president's power to act in Court derives from his constitutional duty to carry out the law. He must, therefore, say what he believes the law to be.
The institutions of political and individual freedom that the American founders established on these shores are Locke's most lasting legacy.
Is it possible that Sheen and King succeeded because they carefully eschewed partisan politics, whereas Falwell failed because he embraced it?
It may be counted among our fledgling nation’s good fortune that a small pocket of Virginia somehow cultivated an enormous concentration of talent.
Parallel studies of Hitler and Stalin are worthwhile not because their similarities, but because of their profound differences.
Over 20 years before Gingrich, Democrats implemented reforms intended to shift the House of Representatives in a decidedly liberal direction.
No ringing rhetoric can change the fundamental reality that motherhood is, by earthly standards, a wretched “job.”
Cavani did not realise that under this dispensation, mere absence of intent was not enough to prove innocence, and was not even a mitigating circumstance.
Organized labor is finding the Biden administration immensely useful in helping it attempt to restore its former glory. But is it too late?
Reading Lasch today, one can see his prescience, as well as the ways that American society has unraveled.
Shakespeare’s plays, including his portraits of the tyrannical soul, remind us that ultimately there is no substitute for studying human nature.
If a small number of sellers will not provide a service to persons of certain political views, classical liberalism does not rule out regulation.
School choice options and democratic elections give all of us the opportunity to form or reform educational bodies in our own communities.
Reading Antigone in the age of coronavirus.
The filibuster may have some costs, but it makes our polity more stable, promotes bipartisan compromise, tamps down polarization, and protects federalism.
The text and Hamilton’s commentary are sufficiently clear: those in office are subject to impeachment and trial; those out of office are not.
A history of French aristocrats before 1789 offers some eerie echoes of our own decadence.
Religious liberty is not a trump card that wins every time, but interference with clergy-penitent privilege will do no good and may produce real harm.
To defend itself morally, liberalism depends on a conception of natural rights, but it also needs natural law.
What information and what warnings should government disclose to the public, and why?
We’re increasingly getting more of the same from Pope Francis.
The idea that education should be an engine of social change has been a hallmark of progressivism for years, so we can’t say we weren’t warned.
The rash of Covid rule-breaking among our leadership class makes me wonder if our leadership class still believe in the democratic standard.
Some advocates of public education have made no secret of their desire to impose particular beliefs and values on students.
We quickly need to get our world reopened as a way to repair the fractures, disarm the demagogues, and join back together again.
The public does not want to consider the question of what price we are, or ought to be, willing to pay to save one life, a hundred lives, a thousand lives.
Many of the problems that liberalism’s critics attribute to a political philosophy are actually the outgrowth of otherwise salutary scientific development.
The Fourteenth Amendment's terms constitutionalize certain pieces of legislation, solving the antebellum and postbellum constitutional struggles.
Ilan Wurman leaves the stars of the Fourteenth Amendment standing in the wings.
The UK and EU have achieved their shared ambition to remove tariffs and quotas on all goods, but the deal will have larger consequences.
Classical education offers a way back from the cliff we’re dangling over.
Legutko’s incisive short chapters on the problem of freedom aim to recover its hierarchical nature.
Washington understood that martial strength secured independence, but republican government would require moral fortitude.
The use of "big data" threatens to erode the presumption of innocence in the name of crime prevention.
There is good reason to think that impeachment remains on the table, even after politicians leave office.
If we truly want to promote America’s common good, even more government intervention than we already have is probably not the way to do it.
In his new memoir, former President Barack Obama waxes eloquent on the topic that interests him the most: himself.
In Lost Illusions and Lost Souls, Balzac proves himself an acolyte of ambition, immersing us in addled souls who can’t let go until it is too late.
It is magical thinking to believe that the United States can run large deficits indefinitely.
A shared, underlying agreement about the dignity of the person is the gravitational center around which our polity and politics orbit.
The bureaucrats that enforce "diversity and inclusion" are often all too happy to maximize ideological objectives at the expense of academic freedom.
What looks like the beginning of a golden age in education may be a blip on the radar.
The representational theory of capital offers a more nuanced understanding of what capital is, and what role it plays in economic life.
The marketplace likely will move much faster than the court system, particularly in as dynamic an industry as technology.
To write about music, commentators must say something about what a piece seems to be evoking and how it does so.
Marc Stears' new book examines how a cluster of writers and thinkers altered the language of English culture and prized the everyday.
Hofstadter was too much a partisan to notice his own blinders, and too little a philosopher to see the permanent things.
Ars Vitae seeks to break out of our modern, therapeutic prison, where the life of man is solitary, poor, dreary, pampered, and much too long.
In an age of demagoguery, judges and justices—members of a highly credentialed elite dealing with complex questions—are perfect targets.
Rome and Caesar are unknown to modern elites who refuse to believe in the existence of great men.
Morrisey provides us with a more nuanced view of Melville’s politics and rich and instructive new way of understanding Moby-Dick.
The progressive push for groups to be engaged in political activism makes them little more than proxies for their members’ political associations.
Even the errors of anti-liberal Catholics now have rights.
Trying to eliminate antipathy, ridicule, and insult from the human heart and mind is a task to make that of Sisyphus seem like an afternoon stroll.
Whereas ideology demands that we manipulate reality to fit theory, true art subordinates theory to reality.
American politics has reached the point where merely establishing the basic facts that frame our political debate takes us to the brink of crisis.
For Manent, action is never an end in itself but must always be guided by the virtues.
Our media, our legislation, and our culture continue to popularize a stilted image of who the modern veteran is.
The operative question is not “how should corporations be managed?” but “who decides?”
For entirely too long, advocates have sought revolutionary change that touches all corners of the land.
The great drama of Frederick’s life is the inner tension between philosopher and king.
Anglo-American cooperation in World War II offered a foundation for "the American Century" by making US policy global rather than hemispheric.
A Journal of the Plague Year is equal parts historical fiction, sermon, and horror story. But it is also a carefully constructed work of art.
Underlying trends cloud the future of classical liberalism, even as it now has gained a redoubt in our judiciary and retained a perch in our politics.
The editors present the five most-read Law & Liberty essays of 2020.
J.K. Rowling believes the same things most people do, and this is the source of her strength as a writer.
The editors present the five most-read Law & Liberty book reviews of 2020.
When it comes to immigration, the fundamental question is: how can we help people find a home? Contra Somin, the answer is not no borders, but humane ones.
Looking beyond electoral advantage and narrow policy questions suggests that people make progress when they face the future while looking to the past.
I am pleased to share with you the top 5 Law & Liberty podcasts of 2020.
Koestler's classic book on totalitarianism, written in 1941, anticipates the woke script of the last four years.
The editors present the five most-read Law & Liberty forum discussions of 2020.
It is high time to focus on what China does right rather than what it does wrong—and undertake to do it better.
Walter Eucken presented an ethical and economic objective for which economists could strive in an imperfect world.
We find some rest in Christmas, in the giving and receiving of gifts—because, as in fairy tales, the beautiful and the good are one.
Joseph Bottum on the almost sacramentality of everything real.
Dickens’ tale is so effective because, in the words of Chesterton, it is targeted not at institutions but “an expression of the human face.”
Pieter Bruegel’s "Hunters in the Snow" is one of the masterpieces of western art.
What was the purpose and the effect of the Marshall Court’s decision in McCulloch v. Maryland?
Christians owe respect to both their civil and ecclesiastical governments, but our deference to authority has gone too far.
It’s far easier to acquire data than wisdom.
Faulkner transports his readers through time, sometimes alternating narrators, with repeated attention to the same families and figures.
Texas’s innovative injury would allow any state to sue any other state, directly in the Supreme Court, for breach of its election laws.
Should energy become a luxury good?
A basic premise of modern Western liberties is that persons reasoning in good faith will inevitably disagree about matters of importance.
Republican presidential candidates will likely use nominee lists to demonstrate their commitments to originalism and constitutional government.
Law & Liberty's friends, contributors, and staff offer their ideas for readings this pandemic holiday.
The Queen’s Gambit is a feminist fantasy, with a chess prodigy forcing Cold War America to become woke sooner than it is ready.
How is it possible after all this to wake up in December of 2020 and not believe that it’s actually twilight in America?
Two films underscore the peril posed by a world of illusion made possible by our media, and the ideological mirages that such illusions can create.
Jacques Necker mounted a defense of limited government characterized by separation of powers between a powerful executive and a bicameral legislature.
Lockdowns, mask mandates, and social distancing rules that apply to everyone are not effective tools against Covid, but what are they really for?
When we stop looking at the past with seriousness, we make it more difficult to understand and contextualise our own commitments.
The dispute over in-person congregational worship in light of COVID is a dispute between two governments that share power over their citizens.
Three cases have brought attention to the racial weighting used by the most elite universities.
BLM's intellectual makeup owes more to Marx and Machiavelli than the civil rights movement.
Genuine association is hard work, but we have found an easier way: we have fallen into a dependence on politics as spectacle.
Peeples helps us to see that Poe’s imagination was stoked by his external surroundings as well as by his interior life.
The Constitution’s original meaning provides a judicially manageable line between constitutional and unconstitutional delegations.
A pilgrim’s journey is his own, and Justice Clarence Thomas has the confidence and self-awareness not to doubt his choices.
When people have the freedom to conceptualize different kinds of liberty, the nature of liberty will be a perpetual source of contention.
When Jane Jacobs analyzed the great Chicago heat wave, she saw conditions were ripe for sliding into a cultural dead end.
There is a ruling class in France and Britain that is indifferent, or even hostile, to the concerns and feelings of the rest of the population.
Burns might not be able to provide easy answers to the problems that bedevil our polity, but she has insights to offer that are worthy of reflection.
Christakis's hurried book sheds little new light on the pandemic, and ends up repeating the shibboleths of intervention when humility is what we need.
The 2020 election did not decide once and for all the future of liberty in America.
Social media mobs and “woke” bureaucrats do not take orders from a single leader, but the denunciations and demands of CRT are totalitarian nonetheless.
Liberty is primarily a way of life—not theory. We will defend it, or cease being who we are.
McDowell makes a remarkable contribution to Milton scholarship by showing how choice and political circumstance shaped the rise of the epic poet.
Justice Samuel Alito's speech shows that originalism will be the parole of the Court going forward, and that Alito will be the originalist of tradition.
Freedom likely does increase the amount of scholarship in the world. Whether that scholarship is valuable is a different question.
Demography is only destiny if we allow it to be, by accepting the left’s transformation of culture.
Is cynicism a powerful support for freedom, or a sign of terminal cultural illness?
The most fashionable ideas on the intellectual right—populism, nationalism, integralism—challenge the emphasis on freedom.
The Social Dilemma's conclusion that we are all helpless consumers, hoodwinked by big tech, is a depressing misunderstanding of humanity.
While enduring the tribulations of sectarian Liberalism, Catholics must have an alternative vision that prioritizes liberty on natural law grounds.
There are no dictionaries of sustainability's Newspeak. Its mavens rely less on new words than on perverting or reversing the meaning of old ones.
Capacious liberalism is the prerequisite for successful, empirically based social reform and the rule of law.
Let 2020 be the year America rediscovers the reverent art of Thanksgiving in the midst of troubled times.
The authority to proclaim a Thanksgiving might seem trivial to us. But it is, in fact, fraught with meaning.
Is money something to be thankful for or something to be mourned? In short, Morrow answers, it depends.
Without a realistic sense of the possibilities, it is impossible to chart a prudent course.
Henrich joins a chorus of others who have asked, what sets the West apart?
In laying claim to an older, and more radical, ecclesial political philosophy, Crean and Fimister elide the fullness of the Catholic legal tradition.
After Hamilton took on the state's debts, it was Gallatin who put plans in motion to pay it off.
If intersectionality is not defeated, Americans will learn the truth that power, not freedom, is truly irresistible.
Pirates are still piratical. And just reprisals are still a lawful way to bring them to justice.
We Hold These Truths was, as it were, false from the moment it was printed.
Must we now embrace unreformed education as an article of faith? Some may prefer to practice their liturgy elsewhere.
Section 230 has not kept pace with the times and now presides over a very different internet from the one it was designed to govern.
Although Len Downie’s tenure at the Post was fairly recent, All About the Story reads like an artifact from a distant era of journalism.
Previously unnoticed evidence provides new support for the proposition that the Second Amendment articulates an individual right to personal safety.
The American Founding's realism about the fallen world might be something St. Thomas would recognize.
Political realism requires a theoretical inquiry into the ethical obligations that result from taking politics seriously on its own terms.
The 1619 Project is more than a national charter of grievances and despair.
Policy inertia means that the Republican Party of 2024 will share more with the Republican Party of 1924 than that of more recent decades.
Three contributors discuss Joshua Mitchell's new book and the trajectory of identity politics.
Identity politics unwittingly prepares the way for a resurgence of fully pagan thought.
Those who seek to rein in our woke madness need to develop targeted strategies, create new political frames, and build workable coalitions.
Narratives of guilt and innocence have been a driving force in politics from ancient times—but has anything changed?.
A gathering at George Mason University to remember the late, great judge.
Our health experts seek perfect safety when it comes to Covid mitigation without careful consideration of the harm their policies may inflict.
Williams’ argument runs counter to how many today understand the Enlightenment movements which reshaped the European world from the late 17th century on.
If the Court decides rightly in Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski, mootness will no longer serve as a shield for the erosion of constitutional rights.
Contrary to the numbers games of today's majoritarians, America's federal republic reflects not a trace of national, numerical democracy.
In the computer age, personalized trust has finally become scalable. It is now a fearsome competitor to the traditional mechanisms for fostering trust.
Murray knew that the reduction of idea of democracy to a set of functions and institutions would be the death of democracy.
Thompson's book rises to what Nietzsche called “monumental history,” but it requires a certain intellectual and historical counterbalance.
The more integration there is in Europe, the greater will be the tensions, both between and within countries.
Emma’s remarkable virtue is revealed all the more through her quite serious vices.
The review of Big Tech’s business practices will do better in deliberate judicial proceedings rather than frenzied, politicized congressional hearings.
Cyclical predictions only carry us so far. And so, therefore, do predictions of a second Progressive era.
While Congress can add justices to the Court, it can only do so if its act is “necessary and proper.”
The case of Kujtim Fejzulai shows just how easily those who devote their whole professional lives to the “assessment” of such people may be deceived.
Rather than being opposites, markets are a superlative form of regulation.
Though Brown and Lincoln never knew one another, Brands presents them as the representatives of a much deeper struggle to shape the future of antislavery.
The Williams Russia Period was not a detour, as Steve’s books, whatever their initial motivations, spoke to America as well as to Russia.
What we can learn from Sir Sean Connery as elder statesman in film.
Schapiro and college presidents everywhere need to reverse the trend of political and intellectual conformity if they want to address student radicalism.
People will not stand to see their cathedrals burned, their teachers beheaded, and their journalists massacred.
One way or another, we must order our common life in accord with a consensus about what makes men happy.
Training sessions based on critical race theory run contrary to an employer’s responsibility to avoid creating a hostile work environment.
We can hardly entrust the outcome of presidential elections to the comparative skills of rival lawyers, even if it’s only once every twenty years.
New forces have been set loose, not unlike those that were unleashed in Italy and Russia a century ago. Will we reap the whirlwind?
This year, the candidate leading on election night may not ultimately be declared the winner. That’s where the problems started in 1876.
It is those men and women who prefer to be virtuous, rather than merely to seem that way, who we need right now.
Safeguard shows that the Electoral College's critics are right about one thing: it is not simple majority rule—and thank goodness for that.
Assessing Fr. John Courtney Murray's We Hold These Truths at 60.
We laugh at images of evil and make them sexy, and Carpenter's Halloween shows us the error of our ways.
While acerbic criticism may rally the troops, it probably does more harm than good in pursuance of civil peace.
Not all constitutional cases of enduring consequence make the front page.
Today we have two civil religions that are shaping citizens’ souls with opposing understandings of justice. Will it last?
LawMacro, as it is currently practiced, has unmeasured confidence in the ability of government to steer the economy.
The Karabakh war is a civilizational clash between democracy and dictatorship, and Americans should be paying attention.
Even in these contentious times, it is possible to approach scientific claims judiciously, with a real desire to uncover the truth.
Protection of even the most radical, pseudoscientific, and irrational ideas is necessary to prevent the distortion of truth.
Despite careful readings of his chosen thinkers, Beiner doesn’t offer deeper analysis of either the alt-right or the several -isms he views as problematic.
The myth of America’s stateless past can be entertained only by ignoring the experience of the U.S. states and the exercise of their vast police powers.
Religious freedom is at the center of liberal constitutionalism and occupies a central place in Jefferson’s and Madison’s political thinking.
As Edward Bernays saw it, a healthy democratic society required the regulation of the beliefs of the many by the work of an unseen few.
What Killed Michael Brown? is the kind of documentary our media once had the guts to produce.
Liberalism must grapple with the transcendence of human persons.
We are in a period of political polarization unprecedented since at least the New Deal, and its waves have engulfed our fundamental document.
Ludwig argues that civic friendship can fit within liberalism and help correct its blind spot(s) to important aspects of life, like civic associations.
As Francesco Boldizzoni details, reports of capitalism’s demise have, time and again, been greatly exaggerated.
While it may be a modest, middle-age virtue, civility is foundational to sustain a pluralistic liberal democracy.
Trevor Shelley succeeds in recovering a noble and humane political perspective within the horizons of modern liberty and modern politics.
We ought not talk as if COVID alone caused the recession.
Corporate directors and other institutional decision-makers should add Cynical Theories to their reading list.
Science’s successes are, in part, what make it so susceptible to the problems that plague it today.
The Trial of the Chicago 7 presents the 1960s radicals as earnest, likeable people who just want peace, man!
Hitchcock told dark stories of contemporary America because he saw dark things coming.
Eastern European leaders haven't lived out Montesquieu’s ideal of checks and balances, but their actions fall far short of Nazism.
The mantra of "follow the science" ignores the reality that no one set of facts can dictate any political result.
Revolutions involve conspiracies of a sort—suppressed intentions and a peaceable surface combined with a determined adherence to the revolutionary cause.
The anger we feel in the present moment is a hot emotion directed at our fellow citizens: it is indicative of in-house strife.
Like a frog in the proverbial pot of boiling water, we are now immersed in the suddenly-ubiquitous delusion of wokeness.
Three recent cases challenge the statutory and constitutional bases of legislative delegation to executive branches.
Tariq Ramadan has been revealed to be a hypocrite of the most repellent kind. Is he a a serious criminal too?
Radical uncertainty—whether stemming from war, disease, or love of coffee—will always prevail.
Radical progressives insist on an array of free goods and services and are showing themselves willing to employ violence and fear to obtain them.
In his new Sanditon series, Andrew Davies’ imagination did not capture the intricacies and craft of Jane Austen.
The influence of law professors like Tribe shows why it is so necessary to confirm justices who will read the Constitution according to its text.
Our claustrophobic informational environments don’t just determine what we think, but what we love.
Revolutionary violence is always an indictment of a political system’s democratic legitimacy.
Did the practice of civility, if such there was, stave off our culture wars or abet them?
Living in the “correct” cultural context, often in poverty, is apparently better for orphaned children than having loving, but white, American parents.
"One nation, under woke, with retributions and grievances for all" is a future we should steadfastly resist.
Eastern European nationalism emerged in a fusion of social and national grievances, and is essential to understanding the region’s history.
Models can provide a useful picture of what we think is happening in the world, but scientists place too much trust in them.
True progress in human government must allow expression to the popular will, but also restrain it by just laws and wise leadership.
Sowell establishes a singular principle for evaluating any proposed education reform: "How is this going to affect the education of children?"
Is America entering a period of despotism? Dreher's new book doesn't issue a conclusive verdict.
Where can thinking with Schopenhauer and Houellebecq take us?
Novelists are no longer interested in leading us into the interior lives of the character.
Civility is not much prized in our revolutionary climate because it is a deeply traditional practice.
There is a broad similarity between the way constitutional provisions and monuments are wrongly discarded.
“The Prevention of Literature” analyzes the mind of the ideologue in thrall to orthodoxies that brook no questioning. That makes it an essay for our times.
Originalists need to acknowledge the traditionalism of constitutional law and that precedential age, endurance, and connection to common practice matter.
The Greek victory at Salamis made possible a period of human flourishing that would prove foundational to Western civilization.
If America minimizes moral calculations in foreign affairs, it will make an admittedly harsh and dangerous world far worse.
The circumstances surrounding the Supreme Court vacancy demonstrate that many have rejected "the immutable fairness of following the law."
Post-liberal proposals tend to leave the term “common good” undefined or ambiguous, and we should consider why.
Gruber’s work may be interpreted as an example of a former radical who has modified her views in light of experience.
We have to balance between the interests of individuals, the state, and associations.
Faith in the Constitution is as revolutionary today as it was in 1787.
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.