For years, a diverse group of liberals and left-of-center commentators have called on Congress to expand the size of the Supreme Court. This argument moved from the background to the forefront after a Republican Senate stonewalled Obama’s final nomination entirely, allowing his Republican successor to fill the vacant seat
Noah Feldman, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, is a frequent public commenter on the state of constitutional law and the Supreme Court. Over the last few years he’s been in a rough patch. He’s written about how Trump’s conservative appointees deserve to be
In 2021 the libertarian representative Justin Amash “reclaim[ed] the word ‘liberal’ for classical liberalism” in a tweet. This wasn’t the first reclamation. George Mason University economist Daniel Klein assembled a “statement of no surrender on the word ‘liberal’” with several hundred signatories, drawing a line in the sand
As an answer to the realist position that the world is anarchic and thus military might is necessary for any state to maintain its power and, by extension, independence, liberals have often answered that the world has moved beyond all that. Liberals often point to the supposed “Kantian triangle”—international
There are a great number of libertarians who abhor bigotry of all kinds—racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. But libertarianism as a party and as a movement has always been vulnerable to extremists and bad actors. Influential thinkers like Murray Rothbard flirted with white supremacy and racist ideas, while Hans
Forged from below, conservatism has none of the calm or composure that attends an enduring inheritance of power…Even Maistre’s professions of divine providence cannot conceal or contain the turbulent democracy that generated them. Made and mobilized to counter the claims of emancipation, such a statement does not disclose
Is America built on a foundation of broken promises? Many constitutional fundamentalists in the legal academy today believe this is without question the case. Joining this conviction is the fear that the promises broken to date will pale in comparison to those broken in the future; that to deviate from
I am all done having babies. I’ve got a toddler and a baby. They are the cutest, best, smartest and most charming children in the history of the world; this is indisputable fact. Who is to say how it came to be that I am the person who got
I can’t change Texas’s law, but you can. You can and everyone else who may or may not like it can go out there and be lobbying forces in changing laws that you don’t like. Justice Sonia Sotomayor There is a great deal to dislike about the
The recent outlook for Indian secularism hasn’t been optimistic. General disappointment within the left abounds in our state institutions, and violent attacks from the right continue apace. Neither these facts, nor the recent judicial abdications in the face of them, are particularly surprising or new. What was shocking was
We are as gods and might as well get good at it. – Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog Ayn Rand was a brilliant, inventive thinker whose contributions go largely unsung outside libertarian circles. Rand developed a secular eudaimonist ethics decades before the 20th century revival of virtue ethics ignited. She pioneered
Despite the hesitancy in some quarters to acknowledge the likelihood of an invasion before February 24, the landscape of analysis and punditry—including myself—has, since that entire calamity earnestly began, come to terms with the fact that what Russia is doing in Ukraine right now is absolutely dreadful. The