Jürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher. He is perhaps most well known for the concept of the “public sphere.” Contrasted against this sphere are the state and the private sphere.
The idea of nullification — essentially, states telling the federal government that state law outranks federal law — is both seductive and persistent. As philosophically desirable as this may be, 200 years of settled law says this is a dead constitutional theory.
While it’s the foundation of our political system, many Americans really don’t understand the Constitution. While many of those who try to help do contribute useful understandings, sometimes their approaches neglect the historical and textual complexity of the document — and are potentially misleading.
In Appeals Court OKs Warrantless Wiretapping, David Kravets summarizes a recent 9th Circuit decision regarding wiretaps by the federal government. How is this possible?
The purpose of history is to provide a mildly depressing, reality-based narrative that helps guide future decisions.
Abortion is a complex and controversial topic. As such, I won’t try to deal with it fully here (nor will I be arguing for or against the legality abortion). I will, however, point out a few issues regarding the subject in Michael J. Nellet’s “How The Left Redefined The Term ‘Rights.’”
The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States remains arguably one of the most controversial, complex, and challenging pieces of Constitutional text.
In this second part of my series on typical problems in lay readings of the Constitution, I will focus on the question of the freedom of religion in Michael J. Nellet’s “How The Left Redefined The Term ‘Rights.’”
There are many challenges when lay people “read” the U.S. Constitution. To illustrate some of these challenges, I think it’s useful and instructive to critique a specific analysis of the Constitution.
During the 1960s, left-leaning critics in the United States began to attack expert agencies they had once supported.
Frank Fischer’s Democracy and Expertise: Reorienting Policy Inquiry argues that the public in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has increasingly gown critical and distrustful of the professions and their practices.
There is a commonly held perception that the United States in the nineteenth century lacked rules and regulations that we today commonly associate with intrusive “big government.”