Editors Note: This is the first of three essays in a symposium on the executive removal cases, Trump v. Slaughter and Trump v. Cook. The following essays will be published on Tuesday and Wednesday. 　　Chief Justice John Roberts’s twentieth year on the Supreme Court demonstrates the contradictions of his career. There is Chief Justice Roberts, the institutionalist, who strategically guides...

　　June is the usual month for the convening of Presbyterian assemblies, but the jewel in the crown of Presbyterian reforms, replacing bishops with lengthy committee meetings, seems less impressive today than it did in 1560 when the Scots held their first General Assembly. In fact, the June assemblies have genuine significance for the history of the Americans, which can be...

　　The Supreme Court ended its latest term with a spectacle that even the most jaded court-watcher may find diverting: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson swinging hammer and tongs at Justice Clarence Thomas over the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. Thomas, with the serene indifference of a man who has heard it all before, mostly declined to swing back. 　　The occasion was...

　　Nowadays no one, I imagine, reads the novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the immensely prolific and once popular Victorian writer, who is remembered principally for three things: first, for having tried to commit his wife to a madhouse; second, for having coined the phrase the pen is mightier than the sword and third for having inspired an annual prize given for...

　　The new Trump Accounts, offering tax-advantaged investment accounts to every American born between January 1, 2026, and December 31, 2028, were officially launched a month ago on the 4th of July. The US Treasury deposited $1,000 in the accounts of 6 million Americans who signed up (out of the 14.3 million eligible); by the end of July, the number enrolled...

　　Let’scall it the Vanderbilt Report for short, though its formal name is “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences.”And none of its ten authors holds a position at Vanderbilt University.It is the Vanderbilt Report because it was commissioned by the chancellor of Vanderbiltand Washington Universities, Daniel Diermeier and Andrew D. Martin, both of whom...

　　In his book By the Dawn’s Early Light, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts paints a picture of a not-so-recent American past—the 1980s and 1990s—that was a veritable golden age. He invokes—from a political ad, of all things—a time when “beautiful” and “young” couples got married, when the gender of those same people was always men and women, which those marriages...

　　Affordability has taken center stage in national political discourse. Foremost in this debate is what to do about our health care system, which nearly everyone agrees is unaffordable for far too many. The mounting frustration is especially visible in renewed calls for “Medicare for All.” 　　Pointing to government intervention as the main culprit behind rapidly rising costs, advocates for market-based...

　　As someone who has long profited from and appreciated Roger Pilon’s work, I must admit that I am gratified to see him reckon with my work—however critically—in his recent essay, “On the Importance of First Principles.” I think the root of our disagreement is not that Pilon has first principles and I do not, needless to say, but that we...

　　Growing up, I had a fascination with books about courtroom dramas: Louis Nizer’s My Life in Court, F. Lee Bailey’s The Defense Never Rests, Irving Stone’s Clarence Darrow for the Defense, and similar fare. I admired these legal gladiators in the same fashion as I did my youthful comic book heroes. They seemed to be larger-than-life, righteous, and standing for...

　　On July 14, the House of Representatives passed the Sunshine Protection Act by a vote of 308 to 117. The bill would impose Daylight Saving Time year-round, nationwide, and President Donald Trump has promised to sign it. It now sits in the Senate, where Majority Leader John Thune has voiced misgivings about a federal mandate, and Senator Tom Cotton has...

　　Brexit was one of the defining political events of the early twenty-first century. Ten years ago, the world was shaken by the images of Prime Minister David Cameron announcing his resignation after losing the Brexit referendum. The vote transformed Britain’s relationship with Europe and offered a powerful lesson about the unpredictability of referendums in the age of social media and...