Wednesday’s ruling was a significant and welcome re-affirmation of a principle that, we should hope, is firmly entrenched in American constitutional law.
Vincent Phillip Muñoz
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?
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.
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.
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.
The talents that have been formed in you will serve the world’s needs that call loudest to you.
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.
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?
The CARES Act isn’t really a stimulus bill. Rather, it is good, old fashioned election-year welfare spending.
Today's gender egalitarianism discourages girls from making the best choices and may sacrifice the individual at the altar of a false collective ideal.
Just because someone asserts that an approach is “conservative” doesn’t make it so, or make it it politically practical or responsive to our times.
It is fitting that this virus is named after its crown-like shape, for like a king, it has exerted control over us and challenged our way of thinking.
Strauss returned to Greece to torpedo Aquinas only to find himself outflanked by Heidegger.
The frenetic pace and consumption-focus of American economic life is not a result of market capitalism, but it may be part of the American character.
The CARES Act makes Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin one of the most prolific dispensers of financial assistance in the history of the world.
Products of the old education would have cheeks that burn red when the country was disrespected. Today’s students only blush at their own "privilege."
Klein fails to see that progressivism contains a fundamentalist impulse that warps judgment on its holy trinity of race, gender, and sexuality.
Hoffer's theme is that sage-like courts serve as a barometer of the zeitgeist—except when they rule against the causes favored by the Left.
This isn't a world-historical crisis but it will enormously amplify and accelerate trends already present in our world.
Those who want space to pursue the common good in many of the ways that Vermeule promotes should be attracted to originalism.
A fairly coherent Right still exists in America—and it needs help, not a re-founding.
Despite Calhoun’s flaws, he was able to use his long career in tumultuous times to develop rare insight into the nature of constitutional government.
Originalism is a form of legal positivism and as such is devoid of moral force, except as a covert method of subverting a dominant left-liberal tradition.
Will Powell’s impressive accomplishments and loyal service to presidents of both parties earn him a place in the pantheon of great statesmen?
The question is not the existence of tradeoffs, but whether the necessity of making tradeoffs will be honestly acknowledged or dishonestly denied.
There is little doubt that there are many who will want to use the epidemic as a pretext for exerting more power and control over the population.
Large as the debt numbers are, the United States continues to be the preferred destination for the world’s savings.
It’s far from clear that plea bargains drive the U.S. incarceration rate.
The most significant developments in the past year suggest a potent originalist future.
In America, officers pursue the common good by maintaining faith with the Constitution’s original meaning. No Dworkinian interpretivism necessary.
We need not grifters or hysterical celebrities, but people dedicated to public concerns who will defend our rights to our private lives.
Our education, licensing, and entitlement policies are driving the young to socialist views which break sharply with America's political tradition.
Conservatives should focus on how Americans actually live today and what set of economic and political arrangements make the most sense today.
The French can provide a form of common life in which all, including their fellow Muslim citizens, can recognize themselves.
If some group of senators is willing to orchestrate an insurrection, the worst thing they could do would be to announce themselves as a bipartisan caucus.
Debates should continue about root causes, but attacking incarceration is not the right way forward.
Like the progressives with whom he disagrees, Erler prioritizes economic well-being as the foundation for happiness.
We might look to Groundhog Day as an unlikely source of wisdom for thinking about life in lockdown.
Taylor seeks to elevate the political ramifications of Thoreau’s appeal to moral conscience as the very preconditions for a just, equitable political life.
Every crisis is clarifying, generative, and destructive. The Coronavirus War will prove no different.
If projections about infection prevalence and necessary hospitalizations that many experts are using are right, the virus will overwhelm US hospitals.
Wright undermined the very basis of his local popularity—the decentralized nature of the House—by supporting reforms that gave power to the party leaders.
Minimaxing carries with it its own costs, and those costs might very well turnout to be greater than the costs of draconian coronavirus policy.
The departure from ideals has very substantial costs that create a presumption against it in the absence of compelling evidence of its necessity.
We can look for ways to enable our kids to learn within communities that will form & habituate them in the ways we would want.
We do imprison too many, and Latzer unduly minimizes the breathtaking severity of America’s criminal justice system.
Progressivism is at war with human nature, and that war comes to sight most clearly in American history.
Remote voting and a more “transparent” Court would likely lead in directions the founders explicitly sought to avoid.
The market has sent a shot over our bow to tell us that we cannot accumulate budget and trade deficits forever.
If the epidemic, or rather the response to the epidemic, destroys thousands of small businesses, what then?
The economic hardship being unleashed on this country is real, and will have long-term consequences, and could itself lead to serious health problems.
Thuraissigiam threatens to make both the law and the facts in every petition for asylum—and there are thousands of them—a matter for the courts.
By engaging in such flagrant projection, the Times has highlighted once again the problem with groupthink in the climate discussion.
O'Connor's correspondence is a goldmine of piercing insight and startling reflections on everything from literature to philosophy to raising peacocks.
Braumoeller dispatches the unconvincing argument that, as Pinker claims, the spread of “Renaissance humanism and empathy” is driving a decline in war.
Goldberg v Kelly illustrated Brennan's jurisprudence—his confidence that the Court was better than the political branches at making social policy.
In treating the military as an education rather than a job or a weapon, Beauchamp illuminates the restlessness of the American heart.
Lind seems to have a picture in his mind of a more cooperative, more Tocquevillian America, but he endorses means that would be immensely destructive.
If we broaden our perspective, we see that the Progressive movement was an effort to undermine much more than just the Declaration and Constitution.
The best way to explain why we incarcerate so much is to explore what would happen if we didn’t.
We’re excited to unveil a fresh design of Law & Liberty to our readers.
The use of -isms distracts us from the basic question: what political and private institutions are better at matching people to capital?
Despite the powerful sense of his absence from our temporal world, the mortal Justice Scalia is very present in these pages.
We ought to read The Dispossessed to appreciate complexity—and the imperfection of our theories in the face of life’s messy reality.
Caldwell's Age of Entitlement argues that the civil rights state is the anvil upon which our nation wages its incessant political contests.
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.
Our system has become utterly cavalier in its use of the criminal sanction.
If we understand the woke madness and the deeper liberal madness driving it, we should be able to fight for America without becoming like the woke.
It is wrong to think of immigration primarily as a problem to solve—as an “it” when it is really a “he,” “she,” and “they.”
Despite Gornick's good intentions, the painful end of the Communist romance dominates her book from start to finish.
Scott Soames demonstrates how analytical philosophy shaped our world, but slights phenomenology and religion.
Coronavirus suggests one important truth: dependence on a single country is to industry what dependence on monoculture is to agriculture.
The film allows us into the head and heart of the characters, making Emma. a love story worthy of standing with Pride and Prejudice.
By what standards do we distinguish real growth from regression, real freedom from veiled enslavement?
Because original meaning depends on facts, it is, in principle, ascertainable, unlike the personal values of judges.
The migration of civil rights standing into environmental law hurt the very groups the civil rights movement was most interested in helping.
There is a foot-stamping petulance to the phrases “trans rights are human rights” and “trans women are women,” as though saying either makes it so.
There are at least two very different visions of what America ought to be, and they increasingly appear to be mutually exclusive.
June Medical reminds us how far we are today from Marbury v. Madison’s holding that courts merely “say what the law is.”
We don't live in a classically liberal economy, so why should we critique labor unions as if we do?
There is no reason to believe that the founders’ approach to church-state relations can be understood by careful study of Virginia’s disestablishment.
Compared to Europe, Canada and Australia the honest answer is “yes—but with good reason.”
Bias response policies rarely emphasize free speech, opting instead for stern, admonitory lists of “no go” topics subject to administrative questioning.
Piety is not itself nonsense and we cannot do without the recognition that some things are higher, off-limits, and worth sacrificing for.
Will bellbottoms, platform shoes, and disco enjoy a similar revival? Don’t count on it; only some retro fashions qualify as “woke.”
Originalism sits uneasily with the concept of independent agencies, and textualism raises questions about the basis for some agencies' independence.
Markovits alternates between acknowledging the opportunity for advancement for all and claiming that the system enables only “the rich” to win.
Althusius offers a rich constitutionalism that empowers persons to thrive alongside one another in deliberate communities.
While challenging politically, the payoff—better medical care at much lower costs—is too substantial to abandon for a lower-performing alternative.
This unchecked mass tort deal making has bulldozed legal process into a forum for mass settlements at the cost of legitimacy.
Holding up Hayek for abuse allows both right and left postliberals to substitute ideological argument for data and analysis of specific policies.
In a culture in which social trust is widespread, entrepreneurship and free exchange become more plausible and sustainable.
lntersectionality makes no allowance for forgiveness, atonement, or reconciliation.
We’ve come to fear not chaos and disaster at the hands of our leaders, but simply failure and sclerosis.
The individual who enters commercial life with Bloomberg-sized ambition takes on a burden few of us would envy.
Three reviews of Yuval Levin's A Time to Build from Rachel Lu, Titus Techera, and Scott Yenor.
No stable common ground has been found with the Left as they march through our institutions creating new, ever more radical and unhealthy ones.
Who will mind the public business? Our elites will. After all, busybodying is their job and their job is all they ever do.
This is, as Levin says, a time to build. But institutions aren’t the only things in the world worth building.
In Joseph Frank's Lectures, we are taught how to read well, think well, and, as for all grand endeavors, to live with eschatological apprehension.
Being wholly unschooled in any institution of representative government, the French relied on direct and violent action.
In The American Democrat, James Fenimore Cooper defended democracy against both mob rule and majority tyranny.
American socialists do not just aim to move the policies of the Democratic Party to the left, but to repudiate the whole history of American Progressivism.
Why did such a brilliantly gifted person waste his talents on politics?
Whether we are trying to account for government failure, or market failure, we shouldn't double count costs.
Nelson successfully shows how the liberal ideas of metaphysical and political freedom were part of a grand strategy to vindicate the justice of God.
Anyone who has thought about identity politics must conclude that the term obfuscates more than it illuminates.
One Brexit effect is that the nation from which the Anglosphere ultimately derives is reassessing many of its most important relationships.
Grossman is especially concerned to recreate wartime experience in its entirety, from the separation of loved ones to heroism, cowardice, and death.
While the Constitution aspires to “establish justice,” its other ambitions—like “domestic tranquility”—are not always compatible with perfect justice.
Underlying the Left's struggles is a realignment of politics away from the economic conflicts of the 20th century toward the cultural battles of the 21st.
Because of its likely rebuff to a key progressive principle, Espinoza is potentially the most significant Supreme Court case this term.
Holland is not a believer, but he does want the West, and the woke, to acknowledge their reliance on St. Paul’s belief that a crucified criminal was God.
The irony is that the problem with Reno’s argument is the problem that Reno identifies as liberalism's fatal flaw, the absence of particularity.
The coronavirus epidemic is a shock to China’s political system, but—unless the death toll spirals out of control—it is probably one China can absorb.
I support the abolition of the death penalty, but its demise seems highly correlated with a weakening of crime and punishment in the UK.
While technology can help facilitate action, self-government requires dedication to an ongoing activity in which Americans make decisions together.
Leon Kass moved from science to the humanities as a renowned teacher of great books and applier of their wisdom, and we can learn much from him.
As with politics, so with law: progressive wokeness ensures that ideas, issues, and legal interpretations once debatable are now placed beyond dispute.
Medicare for All puts American health care on track to follow education, restaurants, hotels, and many other areas of life where two tiers exist.
Dickens’ and de Tocqueville’s travels in 19th century America still provide a guide for understanding today’s divisive politics.
Nationalism itself encloses a secret hope of rebirth which would, properly thought through, go beyond politics.
Public relations seems to have been the Afghanistan War’s most successful operation.
The Democratic candidates offering left-wing variations of Trump's populism recognize the dangers of imitating his transparency on judicial selection.
Lepore’s book reads like an effort to create a storyline that could help us to restore a lost world, but it is not history.
Still engaged in an atavistic class struggle, organized labor operates as a monopoly—long outlawed in every other sphere of the economy.
A new book grapples thoughtfully with Reagan's legacy but misunderstands a central point about his stance on nuclear weapons.
Modern antiliberals on both the right and the left must account for the benefits of markets, and recognize our tragic choice.
Rather than focus on what set of ideas America must revive or reject, we might focus instead on the concrete realities which define our political life.
When Flaherty argues for a "global judiciary," he means a better American judiciary to speak—when convenient—in the name of "the world community."
The key to understanding contemporary Sacrificial Politics is to recognize what people of the Left hold sacred: victims of oppression.
American policymakers and citizens should acknowledge that the benefits promised by economic nationalism are illusory.
This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of Walker Percy’s death, and the eminent philosopher-novelist repays our attention and thought more than ever.
The show is self-righteous about an entirely inverted reality—a Venezuela that is somehow the victim of nationalism in need of social justice.
Executive privilege is not an absolute power, and it often must yield to other claims, such as Congress’s duty to properly conduct an investigation.
Johnathan O'Neill and Joseph Postell respond to Bruce Frohnen's review of their American Conservatism, 1900-1930.
This sorry mess should serve as a cautionary tale to those Americans who have always admired the British parliamentary system, to which Canada is an heir.
The relative success of the U.S. medical system underscores the dangers of putting it under government control.
Words like “catastrophic,” and “irreversible” dominate the discourse about humanity’s impact on global ecosystems. We should ask why.
There is every reason to conclude that Montana's Blaine Amendment violates the Free Exercise Clause.
The Left, having gained hegemony in so many spheres of American life, has grown frustrated at its failure to extinguish the opposition in legal academia.
Postell and O'Neill have produced a volume that perpetuates the unfortunate “Wall Street vs. Main Street” divide in American conservatism.
We must rediscover how Aristotle’s Rhetoric brings light into what Socrates saw as the political “cave.”
We aren’t going to spend or policy-wonk our way out of decline and anomie in certain segments of our population.
In the absence of either public virtue or a decent elite, the logic of Federalist 10 collapses.
Gerwig's characters are real, human girls who must wrestle with the tension between their ambitions and their givenness, their futures and their pasts.