Liberty Law Talk

Wilhelm Röpke (credit: Sueddeutsche Zeitung/alamy.com)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, considered the constitutional architecture provided by these concepts facilitated the necessity of majority rule, and unlike modern theorists of judicial review, also served as the best guardian of minority rights.

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 our constitutional law, persistently moves us away from the text, or from a gross description of the act, and it moves us to the commonsense understanding of the principles that guide these judgments: the principles that help us in making those distinctions between the things…Read More

In this episode of Liberty Law Talk, I discuss with Professor John Inazu his new book Liberty's Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly. Inazu offers his thoughts on resurrecting this most important constitutional doctrine from the doldrums where it languishes as a result of Court rulings.  Consequently, Inazu argues that the freedom of assembly is now unable to offer the full scope of protection to group autonomy that it once did and the harmful affects to associational liberty are increasingly being experienced. He also provides a constitutional and moral argument for a return to this most important of liberties.   Other Related…Read More

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 creditor interests that derive from the code's 19th century origins. This allowed for the sinister use of the public trough by special interests that benefited from the bailouts. Moreover, Professor Zywicki highlights the fallout in corporate bond markets from the subversion of the legitimated process…Read More

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 the case as an exercise in laissez-faire fundamentalism that refused to permit sensible labor regulations on behalf of industrial laborers. Fortunately, students are told, it is a constitutional moment that has been superceded by New Deal jurisprudence that upholds virtually any regulation of economic activity. Professor…Read More

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. Death Grip argues that the infamous Slaughterhouse Cases of 1873 emptied the privileges or immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of one its primary purposes: the protection of economic liberties against encroachment by state governments. This conversation explores the history and intent behind the ratification…Read More

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 the religious, public, and legal duties that were attendant upon marriage in the Roman law and Canon law traditions. The conversation then turns to the increasing role for the state in regulating marriage that emerged with the Protestant Reformation and its own dismissal of marriage…Read More

Union workers from IBEW Local 613 marching in the Martin Luther King, Jr Day parade in Atlanta, Georgia on January 20, 2020 (John Pryor/Shutterstock.com).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 republic.  Many, however, would dispute the term "compromises" and argue that it is an inaccurate understanding of the Constitution's relationship to slavery. Numerous historical arguments center on the protections the Constitution provided to slaveholders through the three-fifths clause, the fugitive slave clause, and the twenty-year…Read More

Union workers from IBEW Local 613 marching in the Martin Luther King, Jr Day parade in Atlanta, Georgia on January 20, 2020 (John Pryor/Shutterstock.com).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 flourish. Unfortunately, much of the American Constitution's attempt to provide these commitments has been lost in the abuses worked by the administrative state and the judiciary's refusal to scrutinize legislation and rule-making that slights the takings and contract clauses of the Constitution. Professor Epstein also…Read More

Union workers from IBEW Local 613 marching in the Martin Luther King, Jr Day parade in Atlanta, Georgia on January 20, 2020 (John Pryor/Shutterstock.com).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 domestic law. Yoo's arguments, however, are not reactionary. After highlighting the constitutional and philosophical arguments made by transnationalists on behalf of this posture, Yoo discusses how the Constitution's structure of separation of powers and federalism can be utilized in aiding America in the growing international…Read More

Union workers from IBEW Local 613 marching in the Martin Luther King, Jr Day parade in Atlanta, Georgia on January 20, 2020 (John Pryor/Shutterstock.com).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 address a variety of diverse topics, they explore three broad topics: 1) the nature of modern culture, its relationship to Christianity, and the origins of the crisis which has engulfed it; 2) the true nature and authentic foundations of human freedom and dignity and the threats posed to them by the various materialist and naturalistic philosophies that dominate the modern cultural scene; and 3) the principles that provide the authentic foundation of a social order in accord with human dignity.  Born in 1882 in Paris, Jacques  Maritain studied at the Lycée Henri IV and at the Sorbonne. In 1901, Maritain met Raïssa Oumansoff, a fellow student at the Sorbonne. Both were struck by the spiritual aridity of French intellectual life and made a vow to commit suicide within a year should they not find some answer to the apparent meaninglessness of life. Bergson’s challenges to the then-dominant positivism sufficed to lead them to give up their thoughts of suicide, and Jacques and Raïssa married in 1904. Maritain’s philosophical work was eclectic, with the publication of books on Thomas Aquinas, metaphysics, religion and culture, Christian philosophy, Descartes, and the philosophy of science and epistemology. However, he also contributed mightily to a defense of the integrity of the human person in the face of twentieth century statism, in both its totalitarian and soft-despotic forms. Maritain’s political philosophy is in the Aristotelian-Thomistic natural law tradition. Maritain, however, pushed further and held that Aristotelian ethics was inadequate for a sufficient defense of human flourishing. Maritain’s political philosophy limns the conditions necessary to make the individual more fully human in all respects. His integral humanism is twofold: The person’s private good is subordinate to the (temporal) common good of the community; however, as a person with a supernatural end, one’s ‘spiritual good’ is superior to society — and this is something that all political communities should recognize.

Union workers from IBEW Local 613 marching in the Martin Luther King, Jr Day parade in Atlanta, Georgia on January 20, 2020 (John Pryor/Shutterstock.com).This discussion with Professor Ralph Rossum of Claremont McKenna College explores the jurisprudence of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.  Rossum posits that Justice Thomas practices an "original general meaning" approach that seeks concord among the three major strands of originalist theory. Justice Thomas incorporates both the framers' original intent and that of the states' constitutional ratifying conventions, as well as Justice Antonin Scalia's public meaning methodology. Thus Justice Thomas, rather than standing underneath the stature of Justice Scalia, among others, may have a far richer constitutional hermeneutic than many of his originalist brethren. Rossum also discusses Justice Thomas' appeals to…Read More

Union workers from IBEW Local 613 marching in the Martin Luther King, Jr Day parade in Atlanta, Georgia on January 20, 2020 (John Pryor/Shutterstock.com).This edition of Liberty Law Talk is a conversation with Ronald Pestritto on Progressivism's transformation of the Constitution. Pestritto, a noted author on Progressivism and its intellectual origins, discusses the philosophical, political, and religious composition of the Progressive movement and how it has shaped our "Living Constitution."

In this conversation with Walter Olson, we discuss the progressive philosophy informing much of legal pedagogy in American law schools and how it has manifested itself in a range of attempts to use law as a political weapon.