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Nov 15, 2024 | 
jamanetwork.com | Andrew Beck
It is after midnight on November 6, 2024, the day after Americans nationwide went to the polls. It is well past my bedtime, but I cannot sleep. Several races, including the presidential, are being called. Like many—from inside my household to the far reaches of our country—I am anxious, awaiting an uncertain future that I fear could stray from values I hold dear.
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Apr 24, 2024 | 
lawliberty.org | Andrew Beck |Daniel Miller |Samuel Gregg |Spencer Klavan
The meta topic sitting beneath the surface of Daniel Miller’s sprawling essay on revolution is a study on the nature of aristocracy and its role in an ordered self-governed society. In the modern context, “aristocracy” is believed to be those possessing the earmarks of inherited wealth, unearned social privilege, and personal vanity.
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Apr 12, 2024 | 
firstthings.com | Andrew Beck
Ten years ago this week, Brendan Eich was forced to resign as CEO of Mozilla, the company he co-founded, because of ginned-up outrage over small donations he made to groups opposed to legalization of same-sex marriage in California. A visionary technologist whose work had made the web a more accessible, free, and enjoyable experience for everyone was condemned as a hateful bigot and treated as a pariah by his company, the press, and on the internet that he was so instrumental in building.
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Jan 17, 2024 | 
americanmind.org | Andrew Beck
Prioritize the civilization that has always been over the nation that never was.
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Aug 30, 2023 | 
lawliberty.org | Paul Scherz |Ronald Dworkin |Andrew Beck |Helen Dale
People have always worried about the future, but not always in the same way. This at least is Paul Scherz’s argument in his very interesting new book, Tomorrow’s Troubles. Scherz, a professor of moral theology and ethics at the Catholic University of America, argues that how we worry these days lies at the root of some of our social and personal problems. We willingly surrender a big chunk of our freedom to managers to enhance our security. Anxiety-ridden, we worry constantly about roads not taken.
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Aug 30, 2023 | 
lawliberty.org | Jim Harper |Andrew Beck |Helen Dale |John O. McGinnis
Is forty years too far along for a book review? Another look at A Common Law for the Age of Statutes by eminent Second Circuit Judge and Yale Law professor Guido Calabresi suggests no. Published in 1982, the book originated in his 1977 delivery of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Lectures at Harvard Law School. If not the cure for what ails the Anglo-American legal tradition, it at least proposes one road out of the precarious place at which our system has arrived over the last century or so.
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Aug 25, 2023 | 
lawliberty.org | Andrew Beck |Yuval Levin |John O. McGinnis |James Patterson
It is easy to agree with Yuval Levin, as on many other points, that our American Constitution is not the problem. But by itself, it cannot provide the national unity Levin discusses. In the divide between pro-constitutionalists and anti-constitutionalists, Levin identifies the James Madison view of government and the Woodrow Wilson view. But a path forward to compromise between the two does not exist. One must submit to the other.
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Aug 16, 2023 | 
lawliberty.org | Lee Trepanier |Richard Avramenko |Jodi Bruhn |Andrew Beck
This year on Canada Day, July 1, it took an act of faith to find something to celebrate. We are eight years into the “post-national” regime of Justin Trudeau. The government elected in 2021 is a minority: technically, it could fall at any time. Yet, in March 2022, on the heels of the prime minister’s invocation of the Emergencies Act to crush the Trucker Convoy, the Liberal Party of Canada struck a supply and confidence agreement with the socialist New Democratic Party.
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Aug 1, 2023 | 
lawliberty.org | Yuval Levin |Andrew Beck |John Inazu |Stephanie Slade
August 1, 2023 Our Constitution can help pull us out of the morass of polarization—if we let it. We live in an age of animosity. Americans are polarized, and often bitterly divided. And the institutions of our public life seem only to exacerbate our discord. Congress, the presidency, and the courts have all become arenas and objects of culture-war enmity, so that frustration with the constitutional system’s assorted dysfunctions is rampant.
