For many decades, the Supreme Court has assumed that the Constitution must change with the times. In the words of Justice William Brennan, “current Justices read the Constitution in the only way [they] can: as twentieth [now twenty-first] century Americans.” This notion of “living constitutionalism”—the idea that we aren’t strictly bound by the meaning a constitutional provision might have had…
You might look around sometimes and think to yourself, a new America has dawned, godless, without the old restraints. Yellowstone, the Kevin Costner Western on the Paramount Channel is the best example I can summon to mind just now, and its third season has just started. It’s a 21st-century story of cowboys and Indians—with characters seeking freedom from law.
Progress is the watchword of our times. Whether technological, political, or even human, we have faith that progress improves. Progress, moreover, moves hand-in-hand with efficiency. Efficiency gives us more good things faster: who could argue with that? Twined together, progress and efficiency form an unbeatable pair, like shade and a cool drink. Rarely do we hear of any negative sides…
When Dante Alighieri died in Ravenna in September of 1321, he probably hoped to rest his bones for a good long time. A hard life of writing and factious Italian politics had culminated in nearly two decades of exile away from his birthplace in Florence, and it was in exile that he completed his greatest work, an epic of over…
It was once a common assumption of American foreign policy that, through open trade and good relations, the United States could integrate communist China into the peace-loving, rule-bound family of commercial nations. It was also widely thought that commerce and economic growth would help China evolve domestically to a more democratic and rights-based system. These were not crazy notions. The…
It has become a common refrain in legal opinions that young people are reckless, impulsive, and prone to “heedless risk-taking.” This fact, which “any parent knows,” has been deployed to invalidate death sentences and long prison terms imposed on juvenile murderers, the logic being that even the most heinous crime, when committed by the young, does not necessarily…
In the name of classical liberalism, Richard Epstein makes an economic case against unions. He assumes that both conventional firms with monopoly power and trade unions can be described as “monopolies” and that both can be analyzed adequately by the highly simplified generalizations of Econ 101. Epstein writes: It is well-established in economic theory that the benefits to any monopolist…
“The king is dead. Long live the king!” This seemingly contradictory proclamation made upon the death of a monarch encapsulates the theory of the “king’s two bodies.” The medieval concept differentiated between the king as a physical human being, mortal and capable of error, and the king as the body politic, “a Body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting…
Imagine that a university has two assistant-professor positions, one for a professor of environmental economics and another for a professor of hermeneutics. If the economist ends up with a higher salary, what would be the most reasonable explanation? A) the economist has skills desired by businesses, government, and nonprofits, forcing the university to offer a higher salary to compete with…
The election of 1988 is just on the periphery of our collective memory in 2020. The youngest voters to cast their ballots that year would have been born in 1970, making them 50 years old today. That means that it is time for historians and political scientists to begin writing in earnest about it, since most people today will have…
