As the Democrats contemplate their next possible window of power, proposals to “pack” the Supreme Court have become mainstream. The usual suggestion is to add four justices to make the current 6-3 conservative majority a 7-6 liberal one. It was six years ago that Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer warned, “I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell...

　　I’m grateful to Robert P. George for bringing before us the famous book by William F. Buckley, God and Man at Yale, and in particular for pointing our attention to its often overlooked subtitle, The Superstitions of Academic Freedom. I have heard of this book all of my life, but I have to admit that I’ve never read it. In...

　　Since the end of the fifteenth century, seafaring explorers have searched for a westward route around the North American continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. The Northwest Passage—and its promise of regular commercial ocean traffic that could ship the wealth of nations—was not crossed until the beginning of the twentieth century. Today, because of climate change, the...

　　United States Supreme Court justices have long insisted that the Establishment Clause must be understood in light of its “generating history.” In 1971, a majority of them adopted an analytical test, known as the Lemon Test, that was purportedly grounded in this history. The test was used with some regularity in the 1970s and 1980s, with results that often favored...

　　Civil society, for Locke, begins with a surrender. In the state of nature, anyone may punish a wrong done to the community. In society, that power passes to a common authority, and only the sovereign may avenge public wrongs. Blackstone put the same idea in the language of the common law: private wrongs are the injured party’s to redress, public...

　　The American vice-president, among others, is no great fan of global trade. He has criticized Margaret Thatcher, Milton Friedman, and the Wall Street Journal editorial board, suggesting that economic prosperity and growth might be overrated if they require America to be deeply enmeshed in global markets. 　　Postliberals as a group have made no secret of the fact that they view...

　　Which story we tell about liberalism is a fraught and consequential choice. A common version, peddled by liberals and postliberals alike, is the Whiggish one: During the Enlightenment, Western man awoke from his dogmatic slumber to realize that the religious ideas of the Middle Ages were backwards and destructive. The rediscovery of the classical world in the Renaissance and ascent...

　　On a chilly Thursday evening last December, citizens in Dorr, Michigan, a small community about a half-hour south of Grand Rapids, attended a town hall meeting to discuss the possible construction of a data center on the north end of town. Some of the attendees came from families who had lived in Dorr for generations and, worried about the disruptions...

　　Gregory Conti, in his introduction to a new edition of John Stuart Mill’s Writings on Representative Government and Parliamentary Reform, writes, “Mill is best known as the embodiment of liberalism.” We may think that we know what this means, but do we? As Conti argues, “Thinkers of [Mill’s] stature need periodically to be reintroduced, lest familiarity breed, if not exactly...

　　Perhaps it is a reflection on the narrowness of my acquaintanceship that I know no one who fails to understand that government hyper-indebtedness is a dangerous thing—even those who hardly give a moment’s thought to economic questions. I do not, for example, know personally any Modern Monetary Theorists (who seem to have gone up and come down like a rocket),...

　　The Fourteenth Amendment is at the heart of many of the most controversial issues that will land before the Supreme Court today. In his new book, David Upham argues that many of the legal theories about it are not deeply rooted enough in the history or text of the amendment itself. He joins the Law Liberty Podcast to discuss. 　　Related...

　　More than a year ago, I observed that “many Americans subscribe to the belief that certain actions are unimpeachable as long as they have an expressive element to them.” The phenomenon appears to grow by the day. The latest installment in this pattern—what I called “free speech supramaximalism”—comes in the form of a New York Times op-ed critiquing, of all...