Not surprisingly, two Ivy League administrative law scholars with technocratic expertise defend the discipline on the grounds that “technocratic expertise greatly matters.” A slightly-edited version of this essay originally appeared in The American Conservative (January/February 2021) as R…
Year: 2020
Clarence Thomas: The Road Not Taken
This essay originally appeared in Law & Liberty on December 10, 2020 (here). Thanks to Power Line, Instapundit (here), How Appealing, The Originalism Blog (here), and Legal Insurrection (here). Early on in Michael Pack’s gripping new documentary on Clarence Thomas, Created Equal: Clarence T…
Trouble in Paradise? (Part 6)
Meet “Dr.” Higdon Ventriloquists need a dummy to mouth their words, puppet masters need marionettes to dance on the strings, and in The Wizard of Oz, the man behind the curtain needed a fearsome figurehead to invoke fear and wonder. Similarly, in many cases politicians and elected officials a…
Trouble in Paradise? (Part 5)
Quiet, bucolic Blount County may soon become a popular destination for “drug treatment tourism,” due to the impending opening of a opioid dispensary in the City of Maryville. Worse, the operators of the drug clinic are key allies of Maryville’s new “progressive” City…
Slouching Toward Totalitarianism
This essay originally appeared in Law & Liberty on October 13, 2020 (here). Thanks to Power Line! Amidst all the other tribulations visited upon these United States in 2020, we find ourselves—like a frog in the proverbial pot of boiling water—immersed in the suddenly-ubiquitous delusion o…
A Scalia Digest
This essay originally appeared in Law & Liberty, on September 17, 2020 (here). Thanks to National Review (here), How Appealing, The Originalism Blog (here), and Real Clear Books (here). Perhaps unfairly, most jurists are quickly forgotten when they leave the bench. Some are remembered only in…
America’s Ruling Class
This essay first appeared in Law & Liberty, on September 8, 2020 (here). Thanks to Power Line, Instapundit (here), and Real Clear Policy! Some excellent books have been written on the separate—and seemingly unrelated–issues of taming the administrative state, reforming our civil justi…
Trouble in Paradise? (Part 4)
A sentinel is like a sentry; it stands guard. When I started this Facebook page a couple of months ago, I posted several introductory essays, entitled Trouble in Paradise? (Parts 1-3). They can be found here, here, and here. My goal is to warn Blount County residents about threats to their idylli…
Gunning for the NRA
This essay originally appeared in Law & Liberty on August 14, 2020 (here). Thanks to Power Line for the link, Instapundit (here), and Real Clear Policy (here)! The non-profit National Rifle Association, founded in 1871, describes itself as “America’s longest-standing civil rights orga…
An Unlikely Higher Education Watchdog Draws Flak
A couple of years ago I started a Facebook page, Stop the Insanity at UT, to raise awareness of the leftist shenanigans going on at my alma mater, the University of Texas. Minding the Campus kindly asked me to report on recent events concerning my page. This essay ran on July 16, 2020.