Assessing the 1619 Project: A Law & Liberty Symposium
In a recent meeting addressing the staff of the New York Times, the paper’s executive editor Dean Baquet announced that the Gray Lady’s new editorial direction for 2019 would include an effort to...
View ArticleUnderstanding Slavery and the American Founding: A Conversation with Gordon...
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...
View ArticleNext on Liberty Law Talk: A Conversation with Gordon Lloyd on the American...
On the current podcast at Liberty Law Talk, I discuss with Gordon Lloyd the problem of slavery and the ratification of the Constitution. Much of the interview considers the historical scholarship that...
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Religious Freedom and State Power in the Latin American Experience
The recent appearance of a number of Christian historical movies, such as There Be Dragons, on the sufferings of Catholics during the Spanish Civil War; Of Gods and Men, on a massacre of Trappist monks...
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Founding Freedom: Self-Government and Slavery in America
To recite the title of George William Van Cleve’s book, A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic, is to beg the fundamental question regarding the...
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Lincoln’s Code of War
The next edition of Liberty Law Talk is with professor and author John Fabian Witt on the subject of his new book Lincoln's Code: The Laws of War in American History. Recently named by the New York...
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So Much Power in So Few Hands: Reevaluating Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation...
In response to: The Emancipation Proclamation: Abraham Lincoln’s Constitutionally Modest Proposal Professor Nichols urges us to revisit the arguments surrounding the Emancipation Proclamation (EP) for...
View ArticleThe 150th Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation
On January 1, 1863 Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves in those states that were then in rebellion against the federal government. It is not a document frequently...
View ArticleThe Peculiarity of the Three-Fifths Rule
The three-fifths rule of the Constitution treated slaves as three fifths of a person for purposes of representation and direct taxation. This provision is puzzling in many ways (above and beyond its...
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An Oppressive Power From the Beginning
Eliga Gould has written an intriguing new history of the diplomatic engagement of the United States in the long period spanning the Seven Years’ War to the Monroe Doctrine. It is different from most...
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Slavery, Abortion, and the Politics of Constitutional Meaning
This Liberty Law Talk is with political scientist Justin Dyer on his latest book, Slavery, Abortion, and the Politics of Constitutional Meaning (Cambridge University Press, 2013). In debates over the...
View ArticleFriday Roundup, December 6th
What should be the purpose of the for-profit corporation? Debate over this question has ignited yet again, and is the subject of this month's Liberty Forum. George Mocsary's lead essay "The Future of...
View ArticleSlave Property in the Old South
This quarter, I assigned Liberty, Equality, Power in the U.S. history survey. I might try another book next year because it’s getting to be too expensive for the students. Anyway, it’s a solid book....
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This Republic of Federalism
Timothy Sandefur’s The Conscience of the Constitution contributes to the debate over the best way to limit the powers of the United States government in order to secure liberty. Sandefur, a lawyer and...
View ArticleSection 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment and Compensation for Emancipation of...
Today, one of the least-discussed aspects of the Emancipation Proclamation is whether it gave rise to a takings claim. The Proclamation was enacted under Lincoln's war powers, whereby he seized...
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The Thirteenth Amendment as a Conservative Counterrevolution
In “If Slavery Is Not Wrong, Nothing Is Wrong,” I proposed that the Civil War was fought to restore the original unity of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and that the Thirteenth...
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An Impressed People
“In 1700s, impressed seamen became second only to African slaves as the largest group of unfree laborers in the British Empire”: and yet, the appreciation of the historical reality and magnitude of...
View ArticleLincoln: Slavery, Sovereignty, and Secession
This past week, I gave a talk (along with colleague Maimon Schwarzschild) on Abraham Lincoln at the San Diego Law Library as part of their exhibit on the former President. My talk was entitled...
View ArticleReacting to Lincoln
In my previous post, I wrote about a talk that I had recently given about Lincoln. I had not expected it to be terribly controversial – in fact, I wondered whether it was such common knowledge that it...
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Honor the Man, Not the Demi-God
In his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln reprises the brevity and complexity that has made his Gettysburg Address so well known and so cherished. He also reprises the Biblical allusions and spirit...
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