John Roberts: A Political Judge?
A review of The Chief: The Life and Turbulent Times of Chief Justice John Roberts, by Joan Biskupic.
Scalia’s Derisive Dissents Have a Serious Purpose
With the derisive tone of his dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia risks inviting public disrespect for the Supreme Court, but he is correct to call out judicial overreach.
John Marshall, Robert Bork, and Judicial Activism
The latest entry in an ongoing debate between libertarians and conservatives over how the judicial power should be exercised: at the website of Reason magazine, Damon Root replies to my ...
No, Judicial Restraint Isn’t ‘Progressive’
Over at the Huffington Post, the Institute for Justice’s Evan Bernick jumps into an ongoing debate about the proper exercise of the judicial power. On one side, libertarian constitutionalists (like ...
Conservatism and Judicial Restraint
For the March 9 issue of National Review, I wrote a review of Damon Root’s Overruled: The Long War for Control of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Root himself has taken notice ...
The Libertarian Constitution
In January, Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) caused a minor stir on the right by speaking in favor of “judicial activism.” When legislatures do “bad things,” he suggested, an “activist ...
Alexander Hamilton, Statutory Construction, and King v. Burwell
These days, every week seems to bring forth another new article by a liberal commentator expressing a powerful combination of fear and outrage that the Supreme Court might “gut” the ...
The Public-Intellectual Menace
Oxford University Press has just released a 30th-anniversary edition of Richard Dawkins’s most famous work: The Selfish Gene. The author’s new introduction, recently excerpted in the Times of London, reminds ...
A Lost Cause
Despite its charms, the quest for conservative rock may be worse than a wild-goose chase.
–Carson Holloway is a visiting fellow in Religion and Public Life in the James Madison Program ...
Begging For Rebuke
Some have advanced the theory that John Kerry’s alleged Catholicism will hurt his prospects in the general election. The idea is not that he will lose the votes of non-Catholics ...