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May 16, 2019|Cold War, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, How Public Policy Became War, New Deal, Progressivism, The Federalist, War on Drugs, Woodrow Wilson, World War I

Politics as War: A Conversation with David Davenport

by David Davenport|

President Roosevelt delivers a "Fireside Chat".
David Davenport discusses how we lost "the cool, deliberate sense of the community" in making public policy and embraced the war metaphor.

November 1, 2017|

What the Opioid Crisis Can Teach Us about the War on Drugs

by Robert VerBruggen|

America has seen a veritable explosion of serious drug abuse over the past two decades. In 1999, the year the Centers for Disease Control switched to a new system for tallying causes of death, Americans suffered fatal overdoses at a rate of six per 100,000. By 2015 the rate was 16 per 100,000, a total of over 50,000 deaths. In the official statistics that year, nearly two-thirds of drug overdoses involved an opioid of some kind—an undercount since many overdoses are not properly coded as opioid-related. Around 60 percent of the opioids on which users overdosed were illicit drugs like…

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Responses

Psychoactive Drugs in Light of Libertarian Principles

by Jonathan Caulkins

Psychoactive drugs collectively nonetheless belong to a small class of products that merit a carve-out from libertarian principles.

Legalizing Opioids Would Dramatically Reduce Overdoses

by Jeffrey Miron

Prohibition makes opioids more dangerous because it forces the market underground, which inhibits normal quality control.

Contra Criminalization

by Andrew I. Cohen

The problems, then, go much deeper than the use and abuse of this particular class of drug.

Don’t Make Anti-Opioid Laws the Villain Here

by David Murray

Confronting a litany of harms from the use of a dangerous substance, he finds the fault not in ourselves, nor the substance, but rather in our laws.

The Opioid Epidemic and Drug Legalization: Robert VerBruggen Replies to His Critics

by Robert VerBruggen

Being mugged by reality is never fun, especially regarding so grave a topic as drug addiction.

April 6, 2017|John F. Pfaff, Locked In, mass incarceration, Prison Reform, War on Drugs

Facts and Myths of Mass Incarceration

by Barry Latzer|

 

 

John F. Pfaff’s Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform is probably the best book on so-called mass incarceration to date. Its great strength is that it is empirically grounded. Pfaff, a professor of law at Fordham, doesn’t cherry-pick data to support some a priori theory, he grapples with the hard realities that the data present. As he well understands, this makes his argument for reducing imprisonment a very tough sell.

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July 11, 2012|Individual Liberty, War on Drugs

Russia, Drugs, and Rock’n’Roll (2): How Best to Keep Rockin’ in this Drugged Free World

by David Conway|

Drugs are a menace of that there can be little doubt. With considerable personal experience of their downside, Neil Young made it the subject of many of his songs. One of these songs was ‘Keep Rockin’ in the Free World’ from his 1989 album Freedom.

Sadly, its deep and bitter irony was lost at the time of glasnost upon the Soviet youth who at rallies used enthusiastically to chant its chorus as a paean to freedom.

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Book Reviews

A Mirror of the 20th-Century Congress

by Joseph Postell

Wright undermined the very basis of his local popularity—the decentralized nature of the House—by supporting reforms that gave power to the party leaders.

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The Graces of Flannery O'Connor

by Henry T. Edmondson III

O'Connor's correspondence is a goldmine of piercing insight and startling reflections on everything from literature to philosophy to raising peacocks.

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Liberty Classics

Rereading Politica in the Post-Liberal Moment

by Glenn A. Moots

Althusius offers a rich constitutionalism that empowers persons to thrive alongside one another in deliberate communities.

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James Fenimore Cooper and the American Experiment

by Melissa Matthes

In The American Democrat, James Fenimore Cooper defended democracy against both mob rule and majority tyranny.

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Podcasts

Stuck With Decadence

A discussion with Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat discusses with Richard Reinsch his new book The Decadent Society.

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Can the Postmodern Natural Law Remedy Our Failing Humanism?

A discussion with Graham McAleer

Graham McAleer discusses how postmodern natural law can help us think more coherently about human beings and our actions.

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Did the Civil Rights Constitution Distort American Politics?

A discussion with Christopher Caldwell

Christopher Caldwell discusses his new book, The Age of Entitlement.

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America, Land of Deformed Institutions

A discussion with Yuval Levin

Yuval Levin pinpoints that American alienation and anger emerges from our weak political, social, and religious institutions.

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About

Law & Liberty’s focus is on the classical liberal tradition of law and political thought and how it shapes a society of free and responsible persons. This site brings together serious debate, commentary, essays, book reviews, interviews, and educational material in a commitment to the first principles of law in a free society. Law & Liberty considers a range of foundational and contemporary legal issues, legal philosophy, and pedagogy.

The opinions expressed on Law & Liberty are solely those of the contributors to the site and do not reflect the opinions of Liberty Fund.
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