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Oct 1, 2024 | 
lawliberty.org | Rachel Lu |James Hankins |Rebecca Burgess |Zachary Yost
Each time a major election approaches, I find myself meditating on the Indian fable about the blind men and the elephant. It’s a famous story, but just in case: a group of blind men encounter an elephant for the first time, and try to make sense of the strange animal by touch. Each one in turn describes the legs, flank, trunk, and tusks, but instead of combining these data points to see the bigger picture, they end up coming to blows as all conclude that the others are dishonest or delusional.
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Oct 1, 2024 | 
lawliberty.org | John Grove |Rachel Lu |James Hankins |Rebecca Burgess
October 1, 2024 An effort to save the university from politics must go beyond free speech. Reviewing David Rabban’s recent book last week, John McGinnis called attention to the distinction between academic freedom and the freedom of speech. The latter concept is often seen as the key to depoliticizing universities, purging them from ideological bias.
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Sep 27, 2024 | 
lawliberty.org | European Politics |Rachel Lu |James Hankins |Rebecca Burgess
September 27, 2024 The indefatigable Bruce Springsteen captures the human will to persevere and transcend. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”Bruce Springsteen is a force of nature. You may not like his music, his politics may annoy you, but there is no denying the charisma, exuberance, and raw power Bruce Springsteen brings to the studio and the stage. That music consists of 21 studio albums, 23 live albums, and 66 music videos.
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Sep 25, 2024 | 
lawliberty.org | Sean McMeekin |Rachel Lu |James Hankins |Rebecca Burgess
A quarter-century ago, most Westerners assumed that communism was all but dead. A few stragglers (notably China) still clung to the label, but these were seen as the final foot-draggers, already in the process of shedding their repressive ways. Free and democratic societies were the new norm. The prevailing sentiment of the day was expressed very memorably in Joshua Muravchik’s 2002 Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism.
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Sep 25, 2024 | 
lawliberty.org | J. Michael Hoffpauir |Paul O. Carrese |James Hankins |Rebecca Burgess
Since October 7, 2023, pro-Palestine protestors have disrupted and occupied American college and university campuses. But these are only the latest instances of an increasingly violent ideology that has been infiltrating American higher education for decades. In his forum lead, Paul O. Carrese rightly argues that ideological orthodoxy that promotes activism over liberal education has produced the recent unrest.
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Sep 24, 2024 | 
lawliberty.org | James Hankins |Rebecca Burgess |Zachary Yost |Mustafa Akyol
In an essay recently published in The Free Press, the political commentator Martin Gurri made a nicely arch response to the fashionable hand-wringing about supposed threats to “our democracy.”I come with good news. We can’t lose our democracy because we never had one.
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Sep 23, 2024 | 
lawliberty.org | George Hawley |Rebecca Burgess |Zachary Yost |Mustafa Akyol
Christian nationalists have received an outsized amount of attention from left-wing scholars, journalists, and activists for the last several years—most recently because Justice Alito displayed a flag at his vacation home that is sometimes associated with the ideology. Secular progressives are mistaken, however, if they view the rise of Christian nationalist voices as an indication that conservative Christians are an increasingly powerful force in American politics.
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Sep 23, 2024 | 
lawliberty.org | Mark Dooley |Daniel Mahoney |Rebecca Burgess |Zachary Yost
The republication by Bloomsbury of the Irish philosopher and journalist Mark Dooley’s superb 2009 intellectual biography of Roger Scruton, Roger Scruton: The Philosopher on Dover Beach, should be warmly welcomed by all serious students and admirers of the late English philosopher and man of letters (the latter appellation was, Dooley tells us, Scruton’s preferred self-designation).
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Sep 19, 2024 | 
lawliberty.org | John Waters |Rebecca Burgess |Mustafa Akyol |Titus Techera
However much he longed to go home after ten years of warfare in Asia, Ulysses the warrior-hero never much wanted to be home. More than the regular warfighter, kings, when home, must submit to certain niceties of social convention. But how dull it is to pause, to make an end. Home is, by nature, too fixed, too ordinary; staid.
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Sep 18, 2024 | 
lawliberty.org | Michael Poliakoff |Paul O. Carrese |James Hankins |Rebecca Burgess
“We understand and recognize what is worthy, but we do not see it through, some through sloth, others putting pleasure above what is noble. There are many pleasures in life: long conversations and leisure, a pleasant vice. And then there is shameful indecisiveness.” – Euripides, Hippolytus, 380-84 As I read Professor Carrese’s fine essay, a certain elegiac feeling settled over me. We have been here before, shocked at the level of civic illiteracy.
