Originalists Were Always for (Some) Judicial Engagement
The tendency toward a firm enforcement of the Constitution’s structural provisions was built into conservative constitutionalism from the beginning.
President Reagan with William Rehnquist, Warren Burger, and Antonin Scalia During the Announcement of the Nominations of Rehnquist as Chief Justice and Scalia as Associate Justice (National Archives).Traditional Precedent Rules Do Not Restrain Judicial Activism
shutterstock.com
Mark Pulliam and the Old Originalism
Preamble to the Constitution (Jack R. Perry Photography/Shutterstock.com)Unconstitutional Constitutional Amendments
The U.S. Constitution (Sergey Kamshylin/Shutterstock.com).Originalism’s Legal Turn as a Libertarian Turn
Chevron Bias, Illustrated by Statistics
What Robert Bork Learned from Judicial Activism, Right and Left
I have been thinking about Robert Bork recently, prompted in part by the 30th anniversary of his rejection by the Senate on November 23, 1987. Next month will mark the fifth anniversary of his passing on December 19, 2012.
Return to Marbury
The travel ban case is headed to the Supreme Court by way of the once redoubtable Fourth and always activist Ninth Circuits, leaving revisionists to wonder how it might have unfolded had it made its way upward through Judge William H. Pryor’s Eleventh. Pryor’s view of the judicial role exhibits appropriate assertiveness within its sphere and a fitting humility beyond it.
Cheap Talk and “Efficient Waste” in Politics (and Marriage)
The signaling model of education is pretty well known these days. Starting with Nobel-prize winning economist Michael Spence’s article on “Job Market Signaling” in the early 1970s, the extreme version of the model articulates a reason schooling would exist even if it did not increase human capital in the least. The canonical story goes something like this: There are two types of workers, high quality and low quality. Employers want to hire high-quality workers, and would be willing to pay them more. But they can’t tell high-quality workers apart from low-quality workers. If a potential employer were to ask applicants…
Judicial Activists Take On National Security
Judicial activism always undermines the rule of law. Rarely, however, does it also endanger national security. Yet the federal judges who have blocked President Trump’s executive orders on immigration have done just that.
The lawlessness of the courts in question has been exposed by a group of five dissenting judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. As these judges so ably observe, the federal district courts that ruled against the President’s policy simply ignored binding precedents—of both the Ninth Circuit and the Supreme Court—recognizing the legal authority of the President to act as he did. Moreover, these judges achieved their aim by deploying an utterly novel application of the First Amendment, holding that an executive order that does not even mention religion somehow violates the Establishment Clause.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- Next Page »
