If you haven’t yet stopped by the Liberty Forum then you should plan to read Ralph Hancock, Daniel McCarthy, and Aurelian Craiutu’s fine essays evaluating the justifications for the democratic nation-state in light of the challenges made by universal human rights claims, transpolitical superstructures that de-emphasize politics and promote governance and administration as the central liberal task, ie., European Union, and the pretensions of an absolutist reason that dispenses with transcendental and cultural arguments for political order.

The current Liberty Law Talk is a conversation with Todd Zywicki of the George Mason School of Law regarding the violations of the rule of law and the bankruptcy code by the Chrysler and General Motors bailouts.

In the Books section, James Bernard Murphy writes on the dialogue between Joseph Ratzinger and the doyen of European intellectuals, Jürgen Habermas, over the philosophical, moral, and religious sources of liberalism. Also, James Rogers reviews Jack Balkin’s Living Originalism.