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?
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.
Theodore M. Porter, in Trust in Numbers, argues that the American distrust of elites — and of government itself — has led to a focus on …
There are many approaches to protecting privacy, but many of them run into conflicts, either with existing protections (perhaps especially the First Amendment) or with those who are suspicious of government regulation. But privacy rights do not necessarily need to be protected in a novel new form as a new right — one could instead leverage existing theories of property to do it.
An alternative approach to creating an entirely new right to privacy would be to extend property rights to cover information or personal data, rather as intellectual property extended physical rules into the realm of the intangible.
In Copyright and the First Amendment: The Unexplored, Unbroken Historical Practice, Terry Hart does an excellent job of exploring why the First Amendment has never been held to interfere with the enforcement of copyright, including pre-publication injunctive relief.