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1 month ago | 
spectator.org | Yardena Schwartz |David Schaefer
Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine that Ignored the Arab-Israeli ConflictBy Yardena Schwartz(Union Square & Co., 432 pages, $30)In the immediate aftermath of the horrific Hamas attack on Israel of October 7, 2023, reasonably informed opinion in most of the world, excluding Muslim or Arab nations, expressed shock and sympathy.
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2 months ago | 
lawliberty.org | Michael Lucchese |Richard Jordan |David Schaefer |Edward Whelan
At least since Edmund Burke, the right has looked askance at mixing mathematics and politics. The French revolutionaries and philosophes, with their elegantly geometric counties and their 10-hour days and their Year Zeroes, were trying to squeeze the unruly contours of human nature into their godlessly oversimplified concepts. But out of the crooked timber of humanity, many conservatives insist, nothing precise was ever calculated.
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Jan 20, 2025 | 
lawliberty.org | Reuven Brenner |David Schaefer |Elizabeth Matthew |Emina Melonic
Politicians and economists promise higher standards of living. Are there reliable, objective measures to help determine when their policies are achieving this goal? At present, most analyses of the question draw primarily on aggregate numbers computed regularly in every country, offered with little commentary on their reliability, either conceptual or in measurement.
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Jan 20, 2025 | 
lawliberty.org | Timothy Snyder |David Schaefer |Elizabeth Matthew |Emina Melonic
It is always a shame when an author one respects for his main writings, publishes a book that is an absolute disappointment. This is what happened when reading On Freedom by Timothy Snyder, the Yale historian and author of rightfully acclaimed books such as Bloodlands, on the genocidal twentieth-century history of the region between Central Poland and Western Russia. In contrast, On Freedom is a political pamphlet, a peculiar mix of memoir, history, philosophy, commentary, and societal criticism.
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Jan 17, 2025 | 
lawliberty.org | Titus Techera |David Schaefer |Emina Melonic |Austin Raynor
Once when I was walking through Cambridge with a friend, we saw a church dedicated to English martyrs. My friend asked, “Mary’s or Elizabeth’s?”—Protestant or Catholic martyrs, in other words. It made me think that one difference between Protestantism and the older confessions or churches is that martyrs feature much less in modern Christianity, whereas it would almost be trivial to say that the Catholic and Orthodox confessions are built on martyrs. Why do martyrs matter?
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Jan 17, 2025 | 
lawliberty.org | Odd Arne Westad |Jian Chen |Samuel Gregg |David Schaefer
From economic shipwreck to global economic player: few people in the mid-1960s could have predicted that this would be China’s trajectory over the subsequent six decades. It was also one of the most important developments in international relations in the late twentieth century. The usual story of how this occurred goes something like the following.
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Jan 16, 2025 | 
lawliberty.org | Aaron Coleman |John O. McGinnis |Mike Rappaport |David Schaefer
Stanford historian Jonathan Gienapp’s new book, Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique, is an important shot across the bow of a venerable legal tradition. Using the tools of a historian, Gienapp aims to draw the methods of public meaning originalism into question. In this symposium, Law & Liberty contributors offer responses from both legal and historical perspectives.
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Jan 16, 2025 | 
lawliberty.org | Jonathan Gienapp |Aaron Coleman |David Schaefer |Emina Melonic
Jonathan Gienapp’s Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique does not come to praise originalism but to bury it. Far from a polemic or a screed, however, Gienapp has produced a profoundly considerate, sustained, and critical attack upon the methodology of public meaning originalism. The result is arguably the most important book written against originalist methodology. Originalists in the academy have little choice but to pay attention to it and respond to its charges.
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Jan 15, 2025 | 
lawliberty.org | James D. Skyles |Cyber Law |David Schaefer |Emina Melonic
Should the government or private sector determine which innovations flop or take off in the marketplace? Most American businesses and consumers would argue the private sector should make this call. However, when it comes to new artificial intelligence-based technology, the Department of Justice appears to believe that the onus should be on the former. Government oversight over this innovative technology rests on an expansive interpretation of antitrust laws.
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Jan 15, 2025 | 
lawliberty.org | Daniel Pitt |Daniel Mahoney |David Schaefer
In the closing sentence of his article for the 2019 Christmas issue of The Spectator, Sir Roger Scruton wrote, “Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.” He wrote these words as a dying man who believed he was on the road to recovery from cancer. Alas, it was not to be. As Daniel J.
