fbpx
Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Rss
Search
Close this search box.
Search Results For:

Search Results for: constitution

the US Constitution

The Constitution and Its Critics

By
Rana’s history prompts us to reflect on how we ought to conceive of American identity and defend the Constitution’s anti-majoritarian checks and balances in the twenty-first century.
Clarence Thomas

A Constitution for Everyone

By
Originalism is a theory of interpretation, but like any form of legal interpretation, it means little unless applied to facts. And facts are wrapped up in stories. Judge Thapar’s book is a reminder not to forget this.
written and unwritten constitutions

Written and Unwritten Constitutions

By
The analogy between individual and political constitutions illustrates the fact that no legal order can be fully encompassed by written instruments, and so it must be elaborated by reference to its underlying historical and philosophic dimensions.
US Constitution

How to Lose Sight of the Constitution

By
Such a substantial proportion of this book is devoted to textualism, originalism, and traditionalism that it is hard to escape the sense that Sunstein protests too much by repeatedly claiming that his moral-philosophizing “reflective equilibrium” is “the only game in town.” And in truth, he leaves his own preferred approach woefully underdeveloped.
kansas, flag

Kansas, the Courts, and the Constitution: An Ongoing Battle for Human Rights

By
In a post-Roe America in which the question of abortion will likely be in the hands of citizens and state lawmakers, it will be particularly important for Kansans to undo their supreme court’s recent error of removing the legal foundation for basic regulations on abortion.
flag, constitution

Calvinball Constitutionalism

By
Adrian Vermeule’s new book, an attempt to rescue American constitutional law by recurring to the “classical legal tradition,” is undone by the author’s unreasonable attack on originalism and his inattention to the Constitution and its history.

Did the Civil War—or Lincoln—Break the Constitution?

By
Did Lincoln regard the Constitution as “broken” and therefore in need of replacement? Or did he believe that the Declaration of Independence represented America’s aspiration to end slavery, and infused the Constitution with this same aspiration?

The Natural Law Thirty Years Later: Clarence Thomas’s Constitutionalism

By
A functioning constitutionalism that protects the people’s rights and fosters good governance requires a sound political theory behind it. Times have changed since the American Founding, but Thomas is right that the natural law teaching in the Founders’ political theory remains as sound and useful as ever.

American Constitutions: Natural Law and Constitution-Making in the Founding Era

By
In order to understand the role of natural law in the American founding, it is helpful to examine the early state constitutions that preceded the US Constitution. Not only did many of them explicitly recognize natural rights as pre-political rights to which all individuals are entitled, they also proclaimed all political power to be inherent in the people, governments to be legitimate only insofar as they secure these rights and are grounded in popular authority, and, therefore, that the people have an inalienable right to reform or abolish such governments that fail or cease to serve these ends.

Natural Law and the Colonial Roots of American Constitutionalism

By
Natural law thinking profoundly shaped the way American and British leaders approached issues involving rights, sovereignty, and constitutional government. However, the imperial authorities and their colonial opponents often appealed to different, and even conflicting, strains of the natural law tradition.

Freedom’s Law: A Primer on Natural Law, Natural Rights, and American Constitutionalism

By
All this week Public Discourse will be republishing select essays from "Natural Law, Natural Rights, and American Constitutionalism," a project of the Witherspoon Institute that was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities as part of its "We the People" initiative. At a time when we have called our traditions and history into question, we provide a primer into the history of our people and our ways of properly understanding freedom and the liberal order.

The “Great Dissenter”: Justice John Marshall Harlan the First as a Role Model of Resistance in a Post-Constitutional Age

By
Justice John Marshall Harlan the First courageously stood against his learned opponents on the Supreme Court. By his example, we too might muster the courage to be “Great Dissenters” against the intellectual and cultural classes that progressives have come to dominate.
Child

The Lincoln Proposal: Pro-Life Presidents Must Take Ambitious and Bold Action to Protect the Constitutional Rights of Preborn Children

By , and
Americans need not accept an interminable status quo of indifference toward the rights of the child, due either to the timidity of our political elite or to the presumption of our judiciary class. The ‘Lincoln Proposal’ offers pro-life presidents the clearest way to confront Roe v. Wade’s jurisprudence of violence and doubt and to protect the constitutional rights of preborn persons.
Books

Isolation Bookshelf: Great Cases in Constitutional Law

By
Chief Justice John Roberts complained five years ago, in the Obergefell marriage case, of some of his colleagues’ “extravagant conception of judicial supremacy.” To understand how such a conception has come to grip the judicial mind, studies of some of the Supreme Court’s most notable cases make for instructive reading.
Supreme Court

Moral Truth and Constitutional Conservatism

By
The Constitution itself directs us to use metaphysical and moral truths that lie beyond it in its interpretation. Indeed, a contemporary judge can be faithful to the Founders only by relying on these truths.

How Slavery Is and Isn’t in the Constitution

By
There was an opportunity in 1787 to have torn up slavery by its roots, and that opportunity was missed. But the missing came as much through overconfidence that the march of opinion would wipe out slavery on its own, and as much through the miscalculations of political compromise, as through any conscious policy to foster or promote slavery.

Our Universal and Particular Constitution

By
Understood as an expression of the common law commitments on which it was built, our Constitution still supplies common terms in which we might re-transform our civic discourse into something rational and productive. The second in a two-part series.

The Thousands-Year Old Constitution

By
Our Constitution is not just positive law, stipulated and contingent on political will. American constitutions do incorporate pre-positive law, often expressly. And that law is neither mere text, nor axioms, nor political ideals. The first in a two-part series.

Forcing Pro-Life Pregnancy Care Centers to Advertise for Abortion is Unjust and Unconstitutional

By
Pregnancy care centers are being targeted by the state of California for respecting the intrinsic worth and dignity of women and children, even when it is unprofitable to do so.

Dishonoring the Dead: Moral and Constitutional Considerations on Fetal Disposition

By and
Texas’s humane dispositions aren’t about trying to sneakily ban abortion. They’re about whether states will be coerced to affirm abortion as a positive good rather than merely tolerating it as a tragic necessity.

What’s Wrong with Rod Dreher’s Straussian Narrative of the American Constitution

By
Because he accepts a Straussian framework that sees modernity rather than Christianity as the major turning point of Western history, Rod Dreher underestimates the influence of Christian and classical thought on the American founding.

A Constitutional Administrative State?

By
All governments must collect taxes, punish criminals, enforce building codes, and license certain professions. The real debate is over how the administrative state acts and under what powers. What would a constitutional administrative state look like today?

The Constitution Already Prohibits Abortion: An Originalist Case for Prenatal Personhood

By
Justice Antonin Scalia, an originalist, famously held that the Constitution neither permits nor prohibits abortion. On the contrary, unborn babies are “persons” within the original public meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, and they are consequently owed due process and equal protection on constitutional grounds.

Commander in Chief: War, Foreign Affairs, and the Constitutional Power to Impeach a President

By
The framers deliberately designed a strong presidency with the power to wage war with energy, secrecy, and dispatch. Impeachment, in turn, was designed to be a formidable congressional check on the formidable powers of the president—power counteracting power, ambition checking ambition.
Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Rss
Public Discourse © 2024 | All Rights Reserved