At first blush, Northwestern University law professor Stephen B. Presser’s just-released survey of legal education, Law Professors: Three Centuries of Shaping American Law, seems to lack a clearly defined mission. Presser, a self-described paleoconservative who says he was influenced by the jou…
Year: 2017
Reclaiming the Federal Judiciary: Start with the Fifth Circuit
The widely publicized judicial resistance to President Donald Trump’s executive order temporarily limiting entry into the United States by foreign nationals from certain countries has focused public attention as never before on the enormous power wielded by activist judges. Many people who do n…
Lone Star Justice
Is Texas’s attorney general a corrupt officeholder or an innocent official being railroaded by political rivals? Texas history is filled with larger-than-life figures who overcame long odds and severe hardships. In many ways, the frontier ethos persists 181 years after the fall of the Alamo. Un…
Supreme Court At A Crossroads: Judicial Engagement VS. Judicial Restraint: What Should Conservatives Prefer?
On February 9, 2017, the Manhattan Institute hosted two experienced litigators—Clark Neily and Mark Pulliam—to explain and debate judicial engagement. With a new Republican administration in Washington—and a GOP Senate majority—conservatives have the opportunity to reshape the Supreme Cou…
Judicial Engagement v. Judicial Restraint
What should conservatives prefer? The legal Right today is broadly divided into two camps: those who support a more engaged judiciary, one willing to overturn state and federal legislation in the interest of enforcing enumerated and unenumerated constitutional rights; and those who believe in a j…
Against “Judicial Engagement”
The Framers did not envision government by judiciary. Conservatives and libertarians share the goal of limited government, and especially of confining the federal government to its enumerated powers. Where they differ is their conception of the relationship between man and state—the heart of co…
Implementing Obergefell: Who Decides the Scope of a Newly Minted Right?
The Supreme Court’s fractured decision in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) required states to recognize same-sex marriage. Obergefell came less than 30 years after Bowers v. Hardwick,[1] in which the court refused to recognize a right to engage in homosexual sodomy. In changing its mind, the Court e…
Neil Gorsuch is Just Round One in the Fight for the Supreme Court
President Trump’s nomination of 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court will be met by fierce resistance by Democrats in the Senate and unrelenting demagoguery from left-wing groups and media outlets. About that there can be no doubt. (American Greatness …
Jim Crow Lives at the State Bar of Texas
White males need not apply for the bar’s board of directors. We now take racial equality for granted, but during the long-gone era of state-sanctioned segregation in Texas and throughout the South, one commonly encountered signs proclaiming “No Colored Allowed” and “Whites Only.” The da…
Will a Tiny, Blind, Subterranean Bug Be the Undoing of the Federal Leviathan?
In 1942, deciding the case of Wickard v. Filburn, the U.S. Supreme Court deemed the wheat grown by an Ohio farmer purely for his own use and consumption—not for sale—to “exert a substantial effect on interstate commerce.” This infamous decision led many to conclude that the scope of Congr…