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The “third-party problem”: one reason telegrams were not constitutionally protected
Unlike postal mail or, later, the telephone, telegrams never received constitutional protection. Yet they were the quintessential nineteenth-century technology of communication, used extensively for business, government, and personal communication, much of which both senders and receivers would have wished to keep to themselves.
January 2014 / 2 min.
“I can’t help myself, I’m a man” – rape apologia, circa 1840
Does this rape defense sound familiar to anyone else? “Man is susceptible to the inclinations of the female sex.”
July 2013 / 1 min.
Embracing the Opposition: The Conservative Appropriation of Liberal Critiques
I have put up a paper I’ve been working on, “Embracing the Opposition: The Conservative Appropriation of Liberal Critiques,” that explores the appropriation of the critiques and rhetoric of liberals and progressives by modern conservatives.
June 2013 / 1 min.
Jurgen Habermas on the public sphere, the state, and the private sphere
Jurgen 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.
December 2012 / 4 min.
Kara Swanson on blood banks, commodification, and “de-propertization”
Kara Swanson’s presentation on blood banks highlighted the move to commodify blood first, and then – at least partly in reaction to product liability concerns – to de-commodify it and move to a service-provider, gift-based system.
November 2012 / 4 min.
Nullification and Obamacare: rejection of the rule of law
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.
November 2012 / 6 min.
History and its purpose: the case of the government and the Internet
The purpose of history is to provide a mildly depressing, reality-based narrative that helps guide future decisions.
July 2012 / 6 min.
Limits of interpretation: critiquing a lay reading of the 14th Amendment
The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States remains arguably one of the most controversial, complex, and challenging pieces of Constitutional text.
July 2012 / 3 min.
The shifting critics of experts and expert agencies
During the 1960s, left-leaning critics in the United States began to attack expert agencies they had once supported.
July 2012 / 3 min.
Nineteenth-century America was not a libertarian utopia
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.”
May 2012 / 4 min.