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.”
The Duhem-Quine thesis, when simplified, explains how a given set of facts can produce more than one apparently true conclusion: essentially, different background assumptions lead to different outcomes.
Theodore M. Porter, in Trust in Numbers, argues that the American distrust of elites — and of government itself — has led to a focus on …
In The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention, David Noble investigates the Western relationship between religion and technology.
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.
One key reason to study history? To learn from the past: (1) take small steps. (2) favor reversibility, (3) plan on surprises, and (4) plan on human inventiveness.
Stephen Turner’s book, Liberal Democracy 3.0, provides a useful background to the problem of expertise — especially scientific expertise — in a modern liberal democracy. What …
Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions — in many ways established the modern field of science studies. Stephen Turner provides a brief, socioligist’s version …
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.