It is characteristic of every age under our Constitution that Americans are prone to see contemporary challenges to the national charter as dire, perhaps unique—or to see the Constitution as urgently in need of being challenged, or changed. Justice Scalia observed, in the Tanner Lectures published as A Matter of Interpretation, that the Constitution’s—any constitution’s—“whole […]
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Shame and Politics
If our goal as Americans is to create a politics fit for persons, we need to cultivate the kind of shame that warns us against the use of persons as means to our own ends. Shame, as it appears in common discourse, means “feeling badly about oneself.” Here, however, I’m interested in shame understood as […]
Somewhere/Anywhere: Reflections of a Brit at the University of Missouri
(Remarks delivered after dinner in the Hall of St. Peter’s College, Oxford on Thursday 28th March 2019 as part of the Kinder Institute-Oxford program, 2019) On our walking tour of Oxford yesterday, we saw many of the university’s most famous places and buildings: The High Street; Radcliffe Square with, at its centre, the Radcliffe Camera, […]
The Constitutional Roots of American Global Leadership on Religious Freedom
Forged out of a century and a half struggle against religious persecution in the colonies, the American constitutional heritage codified an innovative break from centuries of Western practice. Both the First Amendment and state constitutional provisions bar religious establishments and protect religious free exercise from government infringement. These two provisions work in tandem. Freed from […]
An Old Controversy: Marshall, Whitaker, and Marbury V. Madison
While giving a campaign interview in 2014, Matthew Whitaker, at the time a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in the state of Iowa, was asked to name the worst Supreme Court decisions in history. Marbury v. Madison (1803) immediately came to Whitaker’s mind. “There are so many (bad rulings),” Whitaker told his interviewer. “I would […]
