ESB Professional/Shutterstock.comOur Philosopher-King Retires
Seated from left, Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Chief Justice of the United States John G. Roberts, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, and Associate Justice Stephen Breyer and Standing behind from left, Associate Justice Elena Kagan, Associate Justice Samuel Alito Jr., Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch. (Olivier Douliery/Pool via CNP /MediaPunch/Alamy.com)The Supreme Court’s Religion Problem
The U.S. Supreme Court at dusk (Greg Blakeley/Shutterstock.com).Let’s Talk about Sex
The Inconvenient Truths Staring Us in the Face
Paul Ryan Addresses The Economic Club Of Washington, DC (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)Quite a few conservatives, beginning maybe with George Will, are saying that the victory of Trump would be the end of conservatism. Others, maybe beginning with Damon Linker, are saying that the nomination of Trump signaled the end of conservatism. There are many ways of evaluating such claims. Here’s one.
The Court’s Last Shreds of Legitimacy
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)Arise, Ye Prisoners of Scalia
The particular danger of conservatives’ turning to the courts to pursue preferred outcomes, even constitutional ones, is that doing so legitimizes the same strategy by constitutional liberals, who will—it bears repetition—sooner or later reassume control of the levers of judicial power. The time for warnings may soon give way to a season of regret: The liberal judicial ascendance is begun.
Roe’s Progeny: The Abortion Extremes
The kind of extremism on display on the Planned Parenthood videotapes and in the reflexive closing of ranks around the group—whose own leadership has done more to disavow its grotesqueries, or at least the depictions of them, than have its political supporters—is the product of Roe v. Wade, but not for the reasons commonly supposed.
Originalism and Legislative Deliberation
In response to: How Constitutional Originalism Promotes Liberty
The point of Ilya Somin's able and humane Liberty Forum essay is to show libertarians how to deploy originalism as a doctrine to maximize “negative liberty” in America. He doesn’t claim to establish that negative liberty is good, or that its maximization accords with living in the truth or with dignity. It’s enough to say that it’s “an important value” for many people, mainly his people. It’s, as the economists say, a preference, and we all have our preferences or values. He is candid enough to write that all theories of constitutional interpretation are value-laden. There’s no such thing as surrendering…
More Responses
In his famous, breakthrough speech at the Cooper Union in New York, Lincoln remarked on those black slaves who had not thrown in with John Brown. Even though, as he said, they were “ignorant”—even though they had no formal education—they had the wit to see that the schemes of this crazy white man would not…
Ilya Somin’s thesis in his Liberty Forum essay is modest and hedged. Confining himself to “the circumstances of the United States for the foreseeable future,” he argues only that, among the “plausible competitors,” originalism is “likely to be” the theory of constitutional interpretation that best protects the components of “ ‘negative’ liberty defended by most…
I would like to start by thanking Law and Liberty for hosting this symposium, and Hadley Arkes, Peter Lawler, and Ed Whelan for their thoughtful comments on my initial essay. I had planned to complete this reply much earlier. But just as constitutional originalism sometimes has difficulty taking account of new developments, so my original…
Slavery, Abortion, and the Politics of Constitutional Meaning
This Liberty Law Talk is with political scientist Justin Dyer on his latest book, Slavery, Abortion, and the Politics of Constitutional Meaning (Cambridge University Press, 2013). In debates over the legality of abortion common opinion has focused on the connections between the legal treatment of slavery in the nineteenth century and the contemporary status of abortion as a fundamental right. Dyer takes this debate as his starting point but goes much deeper by showing the layers of constitutional, political, and philosophical meaning linking slavery and abortion in the American experience. This conversation covers the ground of the Dred Scott opinion,…
