US Supreme Court (shutterstock.com)The Secular Fallacy and the War on Common Law
Thomas Nast, "Church and State-No Union Upon Any Terms" (Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com).What the Court Misses: Religion, Community, and the Bases of Ordered Liberty
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.
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).The Supreme Court’s Religion Problem
The U.S. Supreme Court at dusk (Greg Blakeley/Shutterstock.com).The Descent Into Quasi-Law
“Stroke of a pen . . . law of the land. Kind of cool.” That insouciant comment, made by Paul Begala when he worked in the Clinton White House, raised controversy when Begala said it back in 1998, but it hardly would today.
After all, just in the past few weeks we have discovered that President Obama plans to sign, on his own authority, an international “climate change” treaty. He calls it an executive agreement and so claims he needs no congressional approval, even though his administrators will use the treaty to impose new policies and rules binding American individuals, governments, and businesses to change their behavior on pain of federal sanction.
The Decline of Constitutional Morality: A Conversation with Bruce Frohnen
Is America in a constitutional crisis or is the country already post-constitutional and merely adjusting to a regime of quasi-law? Bruce Frohnen joins this edition of Liberty Law Talk to discuss this question and his latest book, coauthored with the late George Carey, Constitutional Morality and the Rise of Quasi-Law.
The Elephant in the Courtroom: The Inescapable Legacy of Natural Law
R.H. Helmholz begins his groundbreaking new book with a deceptively humble claim: In early modern Europe and early republican America, natural law had “real but limited success in determining the outcome of contested cases.” Helmholz’s exhaustive analysis of historical records shows that arguments rooted in the natural law tradition influenced court cases in the years before the legal revolutions set in motion by the Napoleonic and American Civil Wars, but almost always in conjunction with citations of positive law. Natural Law in Court: A History of Legal Theory in Practice corrects those who dismiss natural law as mere ideological window dressing,…
The Scholarly Abuse of Edmund Burke
Drew Maciag's Edmund Burke in America is a historiographical essay. After a brief introduction, the author proceeds to a short chapter laying out his interpretation of Burke’s thought, then reviews and characterizes various interpretations of Burke’s work by Americans, beginning in the late eighteenth century and proceeding more or less chronologically through to the present day. Historiographical essays can be quite interesting and helpful for examining the preoccupations and prominent points of view of intellectuals over time. All thinkers of any real stature have within their work a set of assumptions, concerns, and goals that may receive varying emphases depending on…
