Archives for July 2018

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Kennedy, Kavanaugh, and Recess Appointments

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ESB Professional/Shutterstock.com
Justice Kavanaugh would make the greatest difference in relatively non-political cases about executive power.

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The Ideological Blinders of Court Packing Proponents

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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.

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A Bicentennial Reflection: The Effectual Truth of Marxism and Marx

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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.

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Does Classical Liberalism Have a Foreign Policy?

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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.

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The Truth about Happiness

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Edith Wharton, circa 1901 (alamy.com)
The master storytellers have much to teach us about our natures and about what makes us happy.

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Learning for Life: Political Education According to Michael Oakeshott

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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.

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A Commentary on Holmes’s Lochner Dissent: Part II

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

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

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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.

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Michael Walsh’s Anti-Satanic Verses

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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.

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A Commentary on Holmes’s Lochner Dissent: Part I

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Bakery in New York City, 1936 (Robert Kelly/Wikimedia Commons/CC-GY 2.0).
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' two-paragraph dissent in Lochner v. New York does not grapple with the question: what does the 14th Amendment enact?

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