Still image from Operation Crossroads, U.S. nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, July 25, 1946 (Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com).
I am grateful for the learned responses of Professors Bernstein, Levinson, and Stoner to my Liberty Forum essay on law and tradition. Of course, it will not be possible to reply to each point. But it may be simplest to consider the arguments of Professors Bernstein and Stoner together, before more particularly addressing Professor Levinson’s. Bernstein and Stoner are positively inclined toward investigating the connection of tradition and American law, though in different degrees. Professor Bernstein argues that though the common law does depend upon custom and tradition, it has been colonized in more recent decades by intellectual movements that are…