Liberty Law Talk

This next edition of Liberty Law Talk is a conversation with Dr. Gary Gregg, author of Securing Democracy: Why We Have an Electoral College, on the foundations of the Electoral College, its connection with the Founders’ concept of deliberative democracy and the formation of reasonable majorities, and the federalism and separation of powers purposes it […]

The next edition of Liberty Law Talk is a conversation with Charles Kesler on his new book, I am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism.  Professor Kesler’s book argues that the intellectual world of modern liberalism is built on philosophical contradictions about the nature of liberty and the requirements of law and […]

This new edition of Liberty Law Talk is a conversation with Daniel J. Mahoney of Assumption College regarding Alexis de Tocqueville’s counsel in Democracy in America on how Americans can best combat an unbound egalitarianism and the prospect of soft-despotism. Tocqueville’s writings have been significantly featured over the past few years given his warnings and […]

The next Liberty Law Talk podcast is a conversation with historian Richard Gamble of Hillsdale College on his challenging new book, In Search of the City on a Hill: The Making and Unmaking of an American Myth. Gamble provides a definitive intellectual history of this metaphor, now etched, albeit in symbolic new form, in America’s […]

Samuel Gregg discusses the anti-Keynsian fusionist everyone should know: Wilhelm Röpke.

In this next edition of Liberty Law Talk, I discuss with Gregory Weiner, author of Madison’s Metronome: The Constitution, Majority Rule, and the Tempo of American Politics, James Madison’s understanding of how popular sovereignty, federalism, and separation of powers provide the bulwark of protection for a free and vibrant political and social order. Madison, Weiner observes, […]

In this podcast, I discuss with Hadley Arkes the fundamental touchstones of our written Constitution that he contends are discovered through reason and logic in a process that goes beyond the text. In his most recent book, Constitutional Illusions and Anchoring Truths: The Touchstone of the Natural Law, Arkes argues “the task of judgment,  in […]

This episode of Liberty Law Talk is a conversation with George Mason School of Law Professor Todd Zywicki about the blatant violations of the federal bankruptcy code and the breach of the rule of law by the Chrysler bailout. Professor Zywicki stresses that the Chrysler bailout abandoned the bankruptcy code’s clear and known rules regarding […]

In the next Liberty Law Talk I discuss with David Bernstein of the George Mason University School of Law his excellent work of constitutional history Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights Against Progressive Reform. The Lochner decision, of course, is a progressive teaching moment in the American legal academy. Virtually any constitutional law course will teach […]

In this edition of Liberty Law Talk, I talk with Clint Bolick, Director of the Center for Constitutional Litigation at the Goldwater Institute, about his new book Death Grip: Loosening the Law’s Stranglehold over Economic Liberty. Bolick, of course, is no stranger to litigating constitutional claims for economic liberties and property rights, among other achievements. […]

In this new installment of Liberty Law Talk, I discuss with renowned legal historian John Witte the recent reissuing of his classic work, From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Tradition. I discuss with Professor Witte the evolution of marriage law since the late Roman Empire and the pivotal aspects of […]

This new conversation in Liberty Law Talk is with Gordon Lloyd, a scholar of the American founding. Lloyd focuses on the debates in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and the state constitutional ratifying conventions of 1788 in order to better understand the compromises leading framers made to accommodate the institution of slavery in the early […]

In this conversation, Liberty Law Talk discusses with Professor Richard Epstein his new book Design for Liberty: Private Property, Public Administration, and the Rule of Law. Professor Epstein notes that the rule of law requires substantive commitments to generality in application and that it must ensure predictive efficacy if private property and commerce are to […]

In this podcast, John Yoo discusses his new book, co-authored with Julian Ku, Taming Globalization: International Law, the U.S. Constitution, and the New World Order. Yoo focuses attention on the proliferating sources of international law in treaties, conventions, agreements, and customary international law that transnationalists believe should be more easily incorporated into America’s constitutional and […]

In this edition of Liberty Law Talk, we discuss with Russell Hittinger, the William K. Warren Chair of Catholic Studies at the University of Tulsa, Jacques Maritain’s Scholasticism and Politics, recently republished by Liberty Fund. The text is  a collection of nine lectures Maritain delivered at the University of Chicago in 1938. While the lectures […]