Law and Tradition in America: Marc DeGirolami Replies
I am grateful for the learned responses of Professors Bernstein, Levinson, and Stoner to my Liberty Forum essay on law and tradition. Of course, it will not be possible to reply to each point. But it may be simplest to consider the arguments of Professors Bernstein and Stoner together, before more particularly addressing Professor Levinson’s. Bernstein and Stoner are positively inclined toward investigating the connection of tradition and American law, though in different degrees. Professor Bernstein argues that though the common law does depend upon custom and tradition, it has been colonized in more recent decades by intellectual movements that are…
Four Heads and One Heart
James W. Ceaser, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia, has an excellent essay called “Four Heads and One Heart: The Modern Conservative Movement,” in his recently published Designing a Polity: America’s Constitution in Theory and Practice. I read it for this year’s Miller Summer Institute, sponsored by the Jack Miller Center, in partnership with the University of Virginia’s Program on Constitutionalism and Democracy.
It’s an eye-opening piece: Ceaser helped me understand both the unity and the disunity of the right, its agreements and its squabbles. First, the agreement: It’s found in conservatism’s one heart, a heart that hates liberalism. A common “antipathy to liberalism” unites conservatives, not shared intellectual principles.
