The American civil calendar is not alone in being festooned with holidays celebrating political factions and the central state. Most famously, perhaps, the chief French holiday is today, le quatorze juillet: July 14, Bastille Day. By chance I read a celebratory squib last July 14. I objected that ...
[Editor’s note: see also rounds 1-3 of our debate on originalism, interpretation, and whether the Constitution actually means anything. Austin Bramwell, “Original Sins”; Kevin R. C. Gutzman, “The Genuine Article”; and Bramwell, “Best of ...
Austin Bramwell says that I argue, "the Constitution grants the Federal government [sic] a handful of limited powers, but leaves the states free to govern as they like." He adds that I assert, "nobody who actually reads the Constitution could possibly conclude otherwise." According ...
Since the days of Ronald Reagan and Edmund Meese, the Republican Party's position has been that judges should be bound by the people's understanding of a particular constitutional provision at the time they ratified it. This notion goes under the name "originalism." Recent ...
On Monday, June 29, 2009 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled for the plaintiffs, a group of white firefighters, in the case of Ricci v. DeStefano. According to the Court, New Haven, Connecticut violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in throwing out the results of a promotion examination. The ...
People often ask me how I can write about Thomas Jefferson or James Madison, Abraham Lincoln or the American Revolution, the U.S. Constitution or the South. Hasn"t it all been said? Isn"t there already a mountain of books about them? They are right to think that a great amount ...
With its decision in Nordyke v. King last week, in which the recent Supreme Court Heller decision was applied to state law, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals took another step down the long road of "incorporating" the Bill of Rights into the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause. ...
Ohio State University's law school recently held a symposium marking Ruth Bader Ginsburg's fifteen years on the United States Supreme Court. Precisely why this milestone merited such treatment is hard to determine: like Thurgood Marshall, Ginsburg was arguably more important before she reached the ...
Two years ago, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham published American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation. There, as in his public appearances and journalism since, Meacham argued that the United States were founded on a Madisonian vision of secular government. Meacham of course ...
It might have come as a relief for proponents of constitutional government, then, to see Bush return to Texas. It might have, but it didn"t. The electoral defeat of the Republican Party in 2008, after all, meant the replacement of a party that at least talks the originalist talk by one that ...
