Archives for July 2018

July 31, 2018|Bret Kavanaugh, Justice Kennedy, Originalism, Recess Appointments

Kennedy, Kavanaugh, and Recess Appointments

ESB Professional/Shutterstock.com

Justice Kavanaugh would make the greatest difference in relatively non-political cases about executive power.

July 31, 2018|Brett Kavanaugh, Court-Packing, David Brewer, Ian Ayres, John Fabian Witt, Joseph Biden, Merrick Garland, stable equilibrium

The Ideological Blinders of Court Packing Proponents

by John O. McGinnis|13 Comments

Panorama of the United States Supreme Court at dusk in Washington DC, USA (Joe Ravi/Shutterstock.com).

The Court may seem unbalanced to Yale professors, but that appearance is a function of Yale's ideological bubble.

July 30, 2018|Alain Badiou, Alain Besançon, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, communism, Eric Voegelin, Lezsek Kolakowski, Martin Malia, Marx, Marxism, Pierre Manent, Slavoj Zizek

A Bicentennial Reflection: The Effectual Truth of Marxism and Marx

by Daniel J. Mahoney|18 Comments

Monument to Karl Marx in Moscow, Russia (Ekaterina Bykova / Shutterstock.com).

Every student of politics and political philosophy must spend time with Marx, even if only to learn what to avoid.

July 27, 2018|Classical Liberalism, containment, doux commerce, George Kennan, human nature, Model Treaty, Montesquieu, Soviet Union, trade

Does Classical Liberalism Have a Foreign Policy?

by John O. McGinnis|12 Comments

The USS John C. Stennis on August 5, 2016 in Pearl Harbor, HI (Jeff Whyte / Shutterstock.com).

A foreign policy that pursues peaceful trade and self-defense aligns well with what classical liberals know about the limits of politics in general.

July 27, 2018|Aristotle, Edith Wharton, Elizabeth S. Amato, eudaimonia, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Pursuit of Happiness and the American Regime, Tom Wolfe, Walker Percy

The Truth about Happiness

by Jessica Hooten Wilson|6 Comments

Edith Wharton, circa 1901 (alamy.com)

The master storytellers have much to teach us about our natures and about what makes us happy.

July 26, 2018|Identity Politics, Ideology, Michael Oakeshott, political education

Learning for Life: Political Education According to Michael Oakeshott

by Emina Melonic|4 Comments

Paul Gopal-Chowdhury, Portrait of Michael Oakeshott (Image: Gaius & Caius College, University of Cambridge).

Michael Oakeshott aimed to carve out a space for political education without ideology: this makes him especially vital to reread today.

July 25, 2018|Fourteenth Amendment, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, Lochner v. New York, Oliver Wendell Holmes

A Commentary on Holmes’s Lochner Dissent: Part II

by Mike Rappaport|47 Comments

Adobe Stock Images

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's dissent in Lochner draws the wrong implications out of pluralism.

July 25, 2018|Alexis de Tocqueville, Dwight Eisenhower, John Adams, religion and the courts, religion clause jurisprudence, Supreme Court

What the Court Misses: Religion, Community, and the Bases of Ordered Liberty

by Bruce P. Frohnen|47 Comments

Pilgrims signing the Mayflower Compact in 1620, depicted in bas relief panel on base of the Pilgrim Monument, Provincetown, Massachusetts (Lee Snider Photo Images/Shutterstock.com).

We need to understand the role religion played in public life - and still does play - to grapple with how the courts should think about the matter.

July 25, 2018|Michael Walsh, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, The Fiery Angel

Michael Walsh’s Anti-Satanic Verses

by Molly Brigid McGrath|4 Comments

Saint James battles the sorcery of Hermogenes, an emissary of the Devil. Colorized version of a 1565 engraving by Pieter van der Heyden, school of Bruegel the Elder (alamy.com).

A fiery cultural critique that gives off far more heat than light.

July 24, 2018|14th Amendment, Lochner v. New York, Oliver Wendell Holmes