constitution – Religion & Liberty Online

July 04, 2024

What to the Abolitionist Was the Fourth of July?

In academia and culture alike, it has become fashionable to dismiss the principles associated with American independence as shortsighted at best and intentionally exclusionary at worst. “Neither Jefferson nor most of the founders intended to abolish slavery,” wrote Nikole Hannah-Jones in the New York Times Magazine debut of the 1619 Project in August 2019. Continue Reading...

June 27, 2024

Order and the American Culture of Liberty

There is an insightful exchange in the 2003 film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World between Capt. Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) and his friend Dr. Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany). Continue Reading...

June 11, 2024

Becoming a Constitutional People Once Again

Yuval Levin opens his new book, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—And Could Do So Again, with counsel against despair. He writes, “This is a book about America, and therefore, it is a hopeful book.” Continue Reading...

March 14, 2024

The Decline and Fall of Constitutional Law

People around the world are grossly misinformed about the nature and character of government. They do not understand the need for limits on government for it to remain a useful instrument and not a coercive one. Continue Reading...

September 17, 2023

On Constitution Day, Celebrate the Anti-Federalists

Constitutional questions used to be intellectually serious, steeped in competing traditions, and shaped by schools of thought often rooted in divergent interpretations of the American past. No more. Now we get pressing questions like, “Can Trump run for president from prison?,” Continue Reading...

April 27, 2023

Are There Such Things as “Natural” Rights?

It is never out of season to recall James Wilson’s line that the purpose of the Constitution was not to invent new rights “by a human establishment,” but to secure and enlarge the rights we already have by nature. Continue Reading...

May 10, 2022

The Founders’ Constitution and its discontents

The term “constitutional law” is in large part a misnomer. This is rarely discussed within the guild of the legal profession and heretical in the increasingly woke precincts of the legal academy, where the field of “constitutional theory” is a cottage industry. Continue Reading...

October 20, 2021

We are a fractured nation, but there is still hope

It’s become a commonplace observation that while we are indeed a divided nation, we have been divided before and, some claim, in much worse ways. The first part is undoubtedly true, while the second seems more debatable, and this particularly in light of a recent poll coming from the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) at the University of Virginia that shows roughly half of Americans on both sides of the political spectrum seriously indulging fantasies of secession. Continue Reading...

October 16, 2021

Constitution protects nonprofits despite political activism

A healthy state protects life, secures liberty, and defends property. A totalitarian state does the opposite: it arbitrarily kills, compels, and seizes property. J. D. Vance recently appeared on Fox News with Tucker Carlson to discuss a verbal altercation between Arizona State University students, one of whom was the recipient of a Ford Foundation fellowship. Continue Reading...

October 12, 2021

School choice is in jeopardy in a case before the Supreme Court

The difference between a “Christian organization” and an “organization that does Christian things” might seem like a distinction without a difference. But it is precisely this difference that is at the heart of the question presented to the U.S. Continue Reading...

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