The response on American campuses to Hamas' brutality might prompt donors to seek reform. But what is the way forward?
John O. McGinnis
Effective Altruism and Sam Bankman-Fried's limited experience of the world combined to to create a financial implosion.
Cass Sunstein's theory of "fixed points" unfixes the Constitution and thus provides a recipe for intractable division.
Elon Musk's restless and unpredictable genius makes him the target of zealous politicians and bureaucrats.
Jonathan Gienapp's The Second Creation has exerted wide influence. But it is wrong to suggest the Constitution's meaning was not fixed.
Several factors combine to make our discordant times more perilous than most of those in America's past.
James Garfield is known primarily for being assassinated. But his life reveals the character of nineteenth-century America.
It will prove difficult for law schools to evade the colorblindness mandated by the decision. And that is a good thing for legal education.
Those who bear the costs of social engineering policies are often unorganized and easily dismissed.
As attacks on its legitimacy intensified, the Court issued important opinions on free speech, the administrative state, and our colorblind Constitution.
Reading classic literature to young children helps form their imagination and moral judgment. And it's more important today than ever.
In spite of its best attempts, Mere Natural Law does not yet provide a framework for a conversation between originalism and natural law.
A federal agency for licensing AI firms would make Americans more vulnerable to the problems the technology can help us address.
Our political climate of polarization is resulting in the election of politicians for whom outrage and offense are their stock-in-trade.
Biskupic's caricatures of originalist justices and decisions may mislead casual observers, but they offer little insight for those who follow the court.
Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series is the best introduction for a child to virtues indispensable to liberty.
The idea that religious protections apply only to members of "minority" religions and not to traditional Christians runs into several problems.
As a professor and as a justice, Felix Frankfurter combined judicial restraint with lifelong activism in the political process.
What should the Supreme Court’s originalist justices do when confronted with nonoriginalist precedents on which citizens have relied?
In his life and work, Guido Calabresi has harmonized different, even opposed, qualities in himself and the world.
Why are reforms that empower the people so often denounced as "undemocratic"?
The adjustments that AI will demand of our professional and educational institutions first require reflection on what it means to be human.
Samuel Adams had personal experience of the need for self-government and a great resentment of the distant manipulation of colonial affairs.
A sound constitution encoded with classical liberal principles is an anchor for society—one that is hard to haul away and destroy.
The reaction to Elon Musk's vision of a more open Twitter reveals the decline of free expression as a cultural value.
A new book shows how Franklin D. Roosevelt achieved at least some of his objectives in his attempt to pack the Court.
Wokeism in the legal profession may be even worse than on campus.
The upcoming affirmative action cases represent just one skirmish in the struggle for the values of liberal individualism.
The challenges faced by Truss and Meloni illustrate the position of right liberalism and national conservatism today.
Prediction markets offer a sense of the obstacles and opportunities that await us in the future, allowing us to act more confidently as free persons.
Americans can't be united by our common adherence to democracy because we don't agree on what democracy is.
We need a citizenry that appreciates the difference between decision-making authority and substantive political outcomes.
The legal profession's call to abolish prisons only alienates the public, who will regard the academy more than ever as a bastion of folly.
Bruen clarifies the meaning of the Second Amendment, but it also has potentially transformative implications for originalist theory.
The frontier virtues represented in the American western taught that everyone must be prepared to take action when the normal order breaks down.
In Carson v. Makin the Supreme Court holds that the Free Exercise Clause will not be limited by the atextual concept of "separation."
Bushrod Washington may have been the most faithful conservator of the Constitution, and the soundest legal mind on the early Court.
Destroy customary norms of neutrality and hark how social discord follows.
Any reform of higher education must take care to encourage the epistemic liberalism that fits university students to be leaders in a democracy.
The people make the fundamental, enduring decisions about the best framework for promoting the common good within a disciplined, supermajoritarian process.
Beneath the din of partisanship, the Jackson confirmation hearings show that originalism is becoming our law, even if its contours remain up for debate.
Steven Pinker offers a clear and valuable survey of the benefits and contours of human reason. But in politics, at least, rationality is not enough.
Even in our deeply divided modern societies, freedom can build on mankind’s intense yearning for connection.
It would be a mistake to assume the Court's robust conception of precedent for statutory cases should preclude it from reconsidering affirmative action.
Any future digital currency must generate trust. Will it come from the collective force of the state or the innovation of human genius?
The vaccine mandate case could have major implications for the administrative state.
The genius of the American system is that the Constitution fragments power to promote stability, carefully considered policy, and liberty.
At home and abroad, 2021 has been an annus horribilis for classical liberalism.
Our Founders created the jury system in large part to prevent powerful leaders from putting people in jail to satisfy their own political needs.
Today’s citizens are capable of making wise additions to the original design so long as they employ the sound constitution-making process of Article V.
Unlike a basic safety net, universal welfare programs undermine personal responsibility and wrongly assume that the government can measure welfare.
The term’s central question is whether the Court majority can interpret the law as written even as others press for the law's distortion.
An originalist Supreme Court forces the nation into a deliberative mode, requiring compromise and consensus before the Constitution can be changed.
Is Clarence Thomas the greatest originalist justice in the Court's history?
Reviving the original meaning of the Contract Clause would create a steadier and more prosperous polity in the long run.
The justice does not consider at all how jurisprudence bears on the political appearance of the Supreme Court.
Biden's antitrust policies are premised on the false belief that the main barriers to competition are created by the market, not by the government.
It is easy to mock safe spaces, but the demand for them captures a culture's changing priorities.
This term showed substantial, if still only incremental, progress in taming the administrative state and cabining its scope.
A political structure that depends on consensus along the lines Calhoun prescribed may offer the best prospect of social stability in polarized times.
While Fulton's majority opinion did not overrule Smith, two concurrences suggest that Smith is on life support.
Government racial preferences are far from the only source of our divisions, but they may be the one most amenable to legal abolition.
The three-fifths compromise reveals the intricacies of history and the care necessary when critiquing the actions of our forebears.
The genesis, design, and membership of the Supreme Court reform commission all mark it as a distinctly partisan effort.
Amar shows why the Founding and the early republic deserve our continued respect.
HR 1 captures all that is worst about progressivism: contempt for the Constitution, bare-knuckled partisanship, and unearned confidence in central plans.
Why would millions of people be so eager to come to a nation where there is systematic racism, white privilege, and little social mobility?
Our society was once devoted to the rule of law rather than the rule of men. A focus on the representativeness of judges will entrench a rule of identity.
America has gone through times so difficult that even its Founders were despondent, but it emerged still standing. Should we take heart?
The proposed minimum wage hike flies in the face of both economic theory and empirics. It is an offense against principle, equity, and knowledge.
Originalists and historians should not be in conflict, so why is fruitful collaboration so rare?
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 filibuster may have some costs, but it makes our polity more stable, promotes bipartisan compromise, tamps down polarization, and protects federalism.
Many of the problems that liberalism’s critics attribute to a political philosophy are actually the outgrowth of otherwise salutary scientific development.
The bureaucrats that enforce "diversity and inclusion" are often all too happy to maximize ideological objectives at the expense of academic freedom.
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.
Pieter Bruegel’s "Hunters in the Snow" is one of the masterpieces of western art.
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.
When people have the freedom to conceptualize different kinds of liberty, the nature of liberty will be a perpetual source of contention.
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.
Capacious liberalism is the prerequisite for successful, empirically based social reform and the rule of law.
Previously unnoticed evidence provides new support for the proposition that the Second Amendment articulates an individual right to personal safety.
In the computer age, personalized trust has finally become scalable. It is now a fearsome competitor to the traditional mechanisms for fostering trust.
Schapiro and college presidents everywhere need to reverse the trend of political and intellectual conformity if they want to address student radicalism.
John McGinnis discusses what newly appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett will mean for the dynamics of the Supreme Court.
Not all constitutional cases of enduring consequence make the front page.
We are in a period of political polarization unprecedented since at least the New Deal, and its waves have engulfed our fundamental document.
The mantra of "follow the science" ignores the reality that no one set of facts can dictate any political result.
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.
There is a broad similarity between the way constitutional provisions and monuments are wrongly discarded.
Scalia offered the first map of a new world, or perhaps more accurately, rediscovered an old map of the world that had been forgotten.
Original methods originalism embeds the Constitution in the Anglo-American tradition and militates against the abstractions of the French philosophes.
The unitary executive is one place where the arguments of originalists and living constitutionalists reinforce one another.
The Constitution is a framework to facilitate and indeed constitute ordinary popular politics, not something to be transformed by that politics.
Most defenders of originalism agree with Vermeule that originalism needs a justification outside of itself.
Public sector unions are exacerbating our criminal justice crisis and making it much harder to educate the next generation during the coronavirus pandemic.
Local leaders across the nation, many elected with handsome majorities, have been shown feckless in the face of mobs raging through their cities.
Property rights and the neutral rule of law have done far more to sustain innovation and raise living standards than any government social program.
The United States ultimately won the Cold War because we had a more prosperous and otherwise attractive society than the Soviet Union.
Nothing is more essential to our nation than that we sustain schools that will compete against the monolithically left-liberal educational establishment.
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.
Roberts' view is that stare decisis only incorporates results, not the reasoning necessary to arrive at those results.
Interpretation remains a humanistic enterprise, not a purely technical or mechanistic one. There will be errors.
Without the neutral principles of the liberal order, politics becomes all about acquiring power to protect your side from the other.
Neo-Brandeisian jurisprudence places an unaccountable judiciary at the commanding heights of the economy, subordinating the market to the state.
To preserve our federalism the national government must refrain from paying for the past and present fiscal mismanagement by state governments.
Inviting judges to consider the consequences of their decisions or recent practice as guides to interpretation threatens to bury originalism.
New Title IX rules create barriers against the pressures of students, the enthusiasm of Title IX bureaucrats, and the pusillanimity of campus officials.
Never Trump beautifully captures how each group of Trump-averse Republican intellectuals is unhappy in its own way.
Blanket, categorical rules can be both inefficient and self-defeating, as decision-makers lack the knowledge to understand their secondary consequences.
Technological progress will not maximize learning if our educational institutions are mired in an ideology that prevents full use of the tools.
Just as Chevron was an iconic decision marking the rise of the administrative state, so its relative decline is also a powerful symbol.
Today's gender egalitarianism discourages girls from making the best choices and may sacrifice the individual at the altar of a false collective ideal.
Those who want space to pursue the common good in many of the ways that Vermeule promotes should be attracted to originalism.
Our education, licensing, and entitlement policies are driving the young to socialist views which break sharply with America's political tradition.
The departure from ideals has very substantial costs that create a presumption against it in the absence of compelling evidence of its necessity.
Goldberg v Kelly illustrated Brennan's jurisprudence—his confidence that the Court was better than the political branches at making social policy.
The reaction to the end of Warren’s campaign captures the blindness of the academic lounge and the establishment press to which it is intimately connected.
Because original meaning depends on facts, it is, in principle, ascertainable, unlike the personal values of judges.
Originalism sits uneasily with the concept of independent agencies, and textualism raises questions about the basis for some agencies' independence.
Being wholly unschooled in any institution of representative government, the French relied on direct and violent action.
Because of its likely rebuff to a key progressive principle, Espinoza is potentially the most significant Supreme Court case this term.
The Democratic candidates offering left-wing variations of Trump's populism recognize the dangers of imitating his transparency on judicial selection.
The relative success of the U.S. medical system underscores the dangers of putting it under government control.
The Times is doubling down on the policies and cultural attitudes that led to the improbable victory of Donald Trump.
Modern libertarianism has too narrow a view of social harm and too limited a role for government in encouraging mediating institutions that ameliorate it.
The Chief Justice is a former clerk to Rehnquist, so we should look for him to tread lightly in his predecessor’s footsteps.
If classical liberalism seems embattled now, its prospects are likely far worse in the next economic downturn or crisis of national security.
He may seize a few words from jurists here and there to support his version of extreme deference, but he is deaf to the jurisprudential music of the era.
Charles Moore has written a splendid conclusion to his life of Margaret Thatcher.
A more balanced critique of the Attorney General's view of the scope of executive power would be both more persuasive and less polarizing.
If we would become a happier nation by being a more grateful nation, we need changes in public life that would call forth more gratitude.
A recent article points to partisanship as the explanation for several decisions by the Roberts Court, but is unpersuasive and indeed unfair.
Today the Wall Street Journal has the better claim to be the paper of record.
Faith in bureaucratic judgement to replace the market is less justified than ever before, but antitrust is back regardless.
Paradoxically, the worse the policies that the unions foist on our cities, the more progressives need their muscle to get reelected.
Conversations with RBG confirms that the prime reason for Ginsburg's accolades is her relentless progressivism.
The Contract Clause offers the most explicit recognition of the beneficence of private ordering in the entire Constitution. Why can't it be revived?
Goldsmith shows that the government refused to publicly exonerate a sick, old man because it would mean admitting that the FBI botched the case.
The single greatest danger today to the American experiment is that equality seems to be eclipsing liberty as our central goal.
Is California still the state where the frontier spirit best combines with the genius of innovation?
The essential nature of law is changing as originalism meaning takes precedence over precedent.
The dissent in Telescope Media Group v. Lucero offers a glimpse at the progressive vision for the future of the First Amendment.
Daniel Markovits wonders whether the most successful people in the market are happy, but is government the answer?
Oliver Wendell Holmes was wounded three times on the battlefield, and his Civil War experiences affected his outlook and Supreme Court jurisprudence.
The Court’s recent gerrymandering decision recognized Reynolds v. Sims as so flawed in its reasoning as not to deserve mention.
In earlier times, they had an interest in stabilizing our institutions and reining in our excessive political passions. Not any more.
The rise of economic restrictions as a tool of American foreign policy is propelled by factors that will continue long after the Trump administration.
It is hard to overemphasize the importance of lower court judges in making the most of what the Court has begun this term.
The justice's dismissal of common law precedent in the context of written law is a distraction, based on a misreading of history.
In our era of elite polarization, these institutions may themselves become the very sources of the instability that they seek to temper.
And in any case, Merriam does not identify a theory that would deliver better results than those delivered by originalism.
Ordinary politics is unlikely to dramatically change the behavior of the Supreme Court or the Federal Reserve from year to year.
Most modern capitalist societies have both independent central banks and independent constitutional courts—and have them for similar reasons.
Concentrated power is more likely to lead to mistakes of the kind that have been made in Hong Kong, and such mistakes undermine the regime's legitimacy.
Judges are likely to dislike data analytics, but that is no reason to oppose them.
It seems the height of hypocrisy for the left to approve of these boycotts while opposing the right of corporations to speak out at election time.
The most serious vice of this book has one related virtue: it captures the fatal flaw of Stevens' jurisprudence.
Originalism must construct rules of precedent that mediate between the value of following the original meaning and the value of constitutional settlement.
These days it takes a medieval fantasy to help us remember why liberal democracy is worth cherishing.
In the Bank debate, the consensus of the Framers coalesced against use of the substantive intent of the Philadelphia convention.
It is not clear what it will take for the Left to come up with a compelling response to originalism.
Brian Lamb's heroic failure reminds us that the solution to the dishonesty in government is to limit its reach, not merely increase its transparency.
Originalism was the way Constitutional law was done until the progressive era came up with the idea of the living constitution.
When many of the richest people in France stepped up to donate for the cathedral's rebuilding the reaction was not gratitude but anger.
Justice Kagan often asks just the right question in statutory construction cases, and she should carry her logic over to constitutional questions as well.
Critics of William Barr forget that the Mueller Report contains four kinds of material that must be screened prior to release.
Many denizens of powerful and ideologically-uniform institutions disregard the contribution they themselves make to the polarization they deplore.
The movement for criminal justice reform is morphing into just another group in favor of big government.
Giving up on the classical word's essential connection to the best of the West is another form of self-defeating political correctness for the humanities.
The Court is activist when it acts on its own discretion rather than on the basis of a clear dictate of law.
The movement to take down Big Tech is one of the worst features of our populist moment, a classic case of killing the goose who lays the golden eggs.
When socialists run out of other people’s money, they print more of it for themselves: this may make Bitcoin more attractive over time.
Since the creation of Federal Reserve, the value of the dollar has fallen by more than 90 percent, and that is not a surprise.
Institutions matter because, without them, no cultural change is possible.
It is well-established that the House acts as a prosecutor in the proceeding to remove an executive officer, and that leaves them wide discretion.
Working to restore liberty is not certain to win the culture war but acquiescing to the big administrative state will surely lose it.
This is the lesson of Brexit Macron has not learned: the drive for more European centralization will arouse nationalist passions that could end the EU.
Issuing this order about free speech will not make it less likely that progressives will continue to misuse executive authority for their own purposes.
A precedent-only jurisprudence will be not driven by the inner logic of the Constitution, but varying coalitions of the justices and politics of the day.
Tax cuts are generally good because they allow people to keep more of their money, but the best kind also provide good incentives to everyone.
A good constitution thus can cabin the damage that popular movements may do, while still permitting them to shake up complacent elites.
It is not necessarily surprising that students fail to appreciate the hard-won freedoms on which the modern university and our civilization rest.
Since the boundaries of left and right are always changing, a court focused on retaining its political capital would have the constancy of a weather vane.
The advocates for soaking the very rich or even abolishing billionaires offer no realistic mechanism by which the very rich threaten democracy.
For all his contributions to the convention, Madison was not put on the Committee on Detail that provided the penultimate draft of our fundamental law.
What separates a wise political economist or politician from a foolish one is the ability to consider the unseen consequences of their policies.
As Orwell saw, politics is a battle of language, not least because most people think reflexively and not deeply about public policy.
Who wants to shoulder taxes for past services, particularly when the costs include inflated compensation to public sector unions?
Even legal protests mostly dumb democracy down, and when they are conjoined with illegality, they undermine respect for the rule of law.
No cabinet official can get a President in more trouble faster than his Attorney General, and Trump has made the right choice with Bill Barr.
As the parties become polarized, the Presidents become more extreme on the political spectrum.
One often finds more radical views among defenders of tradition these days than the average member of the faculty: who is really defending the status quo?
Constitutional legalism is no panacea, but it is the best we lawyers can do.
The condemnations of illiberal democracy are frequently shallow because they tend to assume rather than show the coherence of “liberal democracy.”
Forces appear to be gathering to push America toward the greatest aggrandizement of the state since the New Deal.
A good compromise on Brexit would require a party system designed to foster agreement, not the government-and-opposition dynamic of Parliament.
Samuel Moyn's assumptions about the purpose of law schools undermine both the profession and the rule of law.
New York City wants to save the Strand by designating the famous bookstore as an historic landmark, but this is a case where "help" actually hurts.
President Trump's has appointed many judges to the court, but quality matters more than quantity.
Why do we accept the idea that the federal government can expansively regulate every aspect of the institutions they help fund?
Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh seem to be diverging on essential questions for modern originalism.
At the time, I condemned him, but now I am far more grateful to George H.W. Bush, who did not inflict much harm and did some occasional good.
Liberty is lost in moral panics: we ought to remember this when we ask the federal government to offer rules for handling campus sexual misconduct.
If consumers want to buy the lottery ticket that litigation in court often provides, they can do so at their local convenience store.
Almost nothing has been said about the rise of U.S. Senators whose careers were fostered by the Federalist Society.
There are certainly a lot of superb female law professors, but they are not at all equally distributed among the discipline's many fields.
Living among elite academics or in deep blue cities makes it hard to imagine voters who are sincerely motivated by social and religious values.
The Supreme Court can be divided into three camps, two of which have claims to be originalist.
The New York Times' Katherine Stewart misreads Christian churches' role in American politics: they pursue not nationalism, but a view of the good.
If the Republicans are relegated to running on the President’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” the Democrats’ implicit slogan is “Make America Europe.”
Diversity is the new creed by which prospective University of California faculty must live.
Now that Justice Kavanaugh is confirmed we can expect a spate of articles saying that the new majority on the Supreme Court will cause the sky to fall.
A feminism of coercion would force men and women into roles they did not choose, and worse still, it would create a world based on lies.
The Supreme Court has wrongly invalidated laws, just as it has upheld unjust ones.
Law is a professional discipline and students should be prepared for the world as it is rather than what their professors fantasize it could be.
Many historians today tell a dismal tale of woe about our Founding, but Wood sees it whole with defects that do not blot out its real virtues.
Law professors talk a lot about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court but they should guard their own legitimacy as well.
A legal world that promoted originalism would generate greater stability.
As with the English Civil War, our own divides will not be resolved intellectually but through politics.
Originalism helps maintain the norm that the Court should follow precedent when there are truly enormous costs of discarding it.
If the Court is as partisan as David Leonhardt thinks, his remedies are useless or counterproductive.
A constitution that puts judge-made law first will be an increasingly unoriginalist constitution as precedent is piled on precedent.
Unlike the modalities approach, original methods originalism can provide a disciplined framework for interpretation.
Social media reveals little about democracy that a serious student did not already know, but the inanity is so relentless now that it is hard to ignore.
International agreements are often quite hard to secure, but this is especially true when achieving this requires states to accept losses.
Originalism may well include some consideration of consequences, but in a disciplined manner that prevents justices' values from driving the process.
It is a vicious cycle: A more powerful state weakens mediating institutions and weakened mediating institutions empower the state.
Many mediating institutions are in trouble today, beset by scandal from within and harassed by the state from without: but how to help them?
If President Trump is going to break norms, he should at least aim to do it productively.
Republicanism, not democracy, might be a structural principle we can use to guide our interpretation of the Constitution.
At its best, originalism encompasses most of the arguments critics claim it cannot, and does justice to both the text and structure of the Constitution.
Expect to see these questions and lines of attack at Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing, because senators often use them, regardless of the nominee.
Expect to see these questions and lines of attack at Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing, because senators often use them, regardless of the nominee.
For the first time in almost two hundred years, the greatest statue of George Washington can be viewed again in the United States.
Why shouldn't it matter to the AALS that conservative and libertarian faculty face discrimination?
The Koch Brothers and other members of the one percent improve democracy by giving voice to views that partisan politicians neglect.
The Court may seem unbalanced to Yale professors, but that appearance is a function of Yale's ideological bubble.
A foreign policy that pursues peaceful trade and self-defense aligns well with what classical liberals know about the limits of politics in general.
The question for Fried is whether constitutional law needs to respond to “changed circumstances" — but isn't this the essence of living constitutionalism?
For most journalists and academics to get a Supreme Court that marches both with them and with the people, they need to elect a new people.
Proponents of a universal basic income forget that the bourgeois virtues that sustain our society flow from embracing the value of work.
The stereoscopic view of judging and the court is richer and more accurate, and journalists would do much better to adopt it.
The mandates of diversity continually expand, and the truth will suffer as a result of the desire to prefer it at the cost of expertise.
Mayor De Blasio fails to understand how markets work: his latest idea to raise pay for ridesharing drivers is evidence of this.
The Supreme Court should test laws against rights in a consistent way, and one way to this is to evaluate whether laws actually meet an essential objective.
By rejecting Abood on "quality of reason," Janus v. AFSCME suggests that the Court will follow a weaker version of stare decisis.
David Brooks calls himself an American Whig, but there are good reasons a Whig restoration is impossible.
The scope of Chevron seems to be shrinking even if the case is not likely to be actually overruled.
In such divided times, we shouldn't be surprised that the Supreme Court embraces passive virtues in order to guard their authority.
Harvard currently faces a lawsuit alleging discrimination against Asian Americans, and the facts reveal the divisiveness of counting by race.
In Sveen v. Malin, Justice Gorsuch argued for a restoration of the Contract Clause: it is unfortunate he could not persuade his colleagues.
The right way to understand the Masterpiece decision is as a sermon on the most essential republican virtues.
In deciding not to participate in research that may be used to harm others, Google's employees are like pacifists in World War II.
The growth of populism in Italy follows logically from the fact the Italians never embraced classically liberal reforms.
The First Amendment only protects us against the government, and that alone makes the NFL's case strong, but they're also correct to limit protest.
Critics often forget that the theorists at the core of American liberty balance liberty and tradition rather than extol pure reason.
We need a constitution that will bend to populist winds so that it will not break.
History is naturally an important part of public meaning originalism.
Progressives have redefined the sacred and are reviving the concept of blasphemy without realizing it.
Michael Rappaport and John McGinnis respond to Jessie Merriam: the legal turn does not imply a libertarian bias.
Attacks on George Mason University's relationship with donors obscure why it has received so many grants: its scholars have a record of excellence.
Universities should create an atmosphere conducive to free speech, where ideas are welcomed so long as they are backed by reasons.
Banking regulations, as onerous and complicated as they are, often fail in preventing runs.
Justice Gorsuch treated due process as part of the language of the law in Sessions v. Dimaya. It’s evidence that the legal turn continues to gather strength.
The distance between the humanities and sciences has grown wider since C.P. Snow discussed it six decades ago in "The Two Cultures." We need both.
An originalist approach to due process can take several forms, and Justice Gorsuch's "surprise" decision in Dimaya v. Sessions reinforces this.
What might explain the rise of illiberal views among putatively liberal people?
The Trump Administration is moving to ensure new taxes face a cost-benefit analysis, and this offers a new way to control the administrative state.
Democracy has been endangered and populism enlivened by the relentless rise of institutions which elites use to insulate issues from democratic contestation.
The ideas of Justice Scalia remain at the center of constitutional discourse even after his death.
A rule of law that is worthy of the name does not play favorites, and this insight remains one of the highest ideals of classical liberalism.
We argue that the U.S. Constitution was written in the language of the law, and that treating it as a legal document strengthens originalism.
Persuading the courts to accept originalism is a long-term project, and involves changing the culture of the legal profession.
Progressives tend to view arguments about subsidiarity as one more means to push an agenda for egalitarian uniformity.
Democracy is subject to many forms of persuasion, within and without: this should be cause to give central governments less power, not more.
The dematerializing nature of the world can be a boon to the middling classes, and the sharing economy provides an example of this.
Calls for stricter regulation on home rental companies like Airbnb are about protecting the hotel industry, not the consumer or communities.
E.O. Wilson offers us a kind of environmentalism that ignores trade-offs, a fact that moves his arguments from the realm of policy to that of faith.
Daniel Kishi's attack on Robert Bork betrays a startling misunderstanding of the debt antitrust jurisprudence owes to the late judge.
John McGinnis imagines a speech from President Trump on entitlement reform, and how he could win bigly.
Middlemarch offers a defense of classical liberalism that celebrates the role of marriage and the market in bettering our lives together.
The adulation of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which appears ever growing on the left, raises concerns about the left’s model of a justice and of justice.
Democracies need all the help they can get, including religion, to muster the better angels of ourselves for the sacrifice that sustains decent politics.
Even ardent secularists should recognize the benefits that flow from religion appearing in the public sphere.
Ideological uniformity undermines the university's commitment to truth, and does a disservice to society as a whole.
Conservatives should focus on creating the legal space for innovation in higher education, not regulate it more.
The President shouldn't remove Robert Mueller, but he is fully within his constitutional rights to do so.
The bureaucracy possesses the power to make law and dictate how its statutes should be interpreted - this flies in the face of the separation of powers.
Imperfect markets don't mean that regulation is the answer; competition often does a better job than bureaucracy at improving outcomes.
In the academic world, originalism has become the theory of constitutional interpretation to beat.
Government shutdowns are a kind of hostage-taking, and they'll only stop when we deprive legislators of the ability to shut government down.
Resignations in protest aren't always what they seem, and they mean a lot less when they come from individuals whose terms expire in a few months.
Why has Thomas Jefferson become the progressives' favorite founder?
It is modern liberalism, not classical liberalism, that blurs the distinction between the state and society, and that destroys ordered liberty.
Patrick Deneen thinks liberalism has reached a dead end, but perhaps it is only social democracy whose fate is sealed.
These two organizations seem like mirror images of one another, so what explains their different approaches to debate?
Is the American judiciary subservient to the rule of the majority?
Key Trump policies advanced classical liberalism, but his association with them may damage them in the long run.
And this year the most important technological event was the performance of Alpha Zero, a computer chess program,
Chernow's book argues that Grant was both a great general and very good President.
Our era of radical polarization makes it more important than ever to create two kinds of reforms: electoral and size of government.
Focusing on the long-term causes of California's plight the New York Times is offering its readers the journalistic equivalent of comfort food.
Bitcoin's market power will grow as it is traded in futures markets.
Subordinating the speech rights of those in commerce to a social movement overlooks the core principle of free speech.
Progressives aim to create centers of constitutionally protected power naturally inhabited by left-liberals and thus resistant to the vagaries of electoral control.
Robert Bork was only the beginning of the case and does not mark the best understanding of originalism today.
Heather Gerken, the Dean of the Yale School, proudly says that national federalism is not “your father’s federalism.” That may be well be true, but neither is it "our Framers' federalism."