fbpx

Law and Liberty Celebrates Its Second Year!

This past weekend Law and Liberty celebrated its second anniversary. Having started our run in January of 2012, we have grown tremendously over the past 2 years. In 2013 we received 1.66 million hits, registering almost a 70% gain over 2012. Our unique visitors total rose 54% to 351,000. While 2013 was another promising year for Law and Liberty, 2014 will feature more content and continue our deep engagement with academic and contemporary topics. Our charge is to translate Liberty Fund on to the web in a site devoted to law and political thought. At the core is a desire to debate the relationship between law and (liberty and responsibility), relying on a range of voices to illuminate the discussion.

Mike Greve and Mike Rappaport kept us anchored this year around the pillars of competitive federalism, the dysfunctional administrative state, and original methods originalism. The high level of writing on this site began and continues with their example. For that, I am very grateful.

We also picked up some new writers this year with Angelo Codevilla illuminating the stunning lack of competency in our bipartisan foreign policy adventures, that is, when he wasn’t demonstrating to NSA staff the essential principles of counter-intellingence. The great Theodore Dalrymple continued to remind us of the flatness and decency of democratic life. Ken Masugi maintained his stellar record of teaching about natural rights and the Constitution while simultaneously spawning the refreshing sensation of a thousand disagreements. Greg Weiner, the Texan stationed in Massachusetts for professorial duties, spelled out in great detail the numerous conservative applications of Madison’s constitutional metronome. As Weiner can be heard to say, stand atop the madness and yell separation of powers, proclaim the decency of majorities when liberally seasoned with roadblocks. In this way, we can rejoice in the defect of better motives. Proving that history is better without historicism, Richard Samuelson gave us constitutional history as if ideas mattered most. Imagine that. David Upham managed to single-handedly change what we think about the history of the 14th Amendment and interracial marriage, proving that there is no better way to dispel progressive history than to actually do the work of legal history. A very special thanks as well to Todd Zywicki, Alex Pollock, and Vern McKinley for their excellent reviews and posts on financial regulation and monetary policy.

So it is now on to the hope of a new year and new possibilities. Things have already started well with John McGinnis’ arrival as our third blogger. Upcoming are features on new books by Richard Epstein, Ralph Rossum, as well as a discussion of American liberty and the failure to remember well its foundations and the practices that maintained it. I suspect 2014 will provide difficulties of its own, man being born to trouble and all that. We’ll be here. Your distress is our distress. But we’ll also continue to discuss the signs of recovery and re-founding that are surely present. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to join us.

Related

U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii addresses the National Guard Association of the United States 138th General Conference, Baltimore, Md., Sept. 12, 2016. (U.S. Army National Guard photo by Sgt. 1st Class Jim Greenhill)

The Woke and the Dead

The Democratic primary may well offer the most demanding test of virtue-signaling ever yet devised outside of Ivy League presidential searches.