2050 search results for: Supreme%25252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252525252BCourt

There is no pleasing Duke University law professor Brandon L. Garrett, author of the death-penalty-abolishment screed End of Its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice, though much about the current state of criminal justice should please him.  Nationwide, death sentences and executions are at historic lows, yet he claims that the...

The search for and, when it cannot be found, the construction of a usable past remains the overriding task of our official historians, who believe that we are forever on the cusp of a new age.  The opposite could be said of Thucydides, who sought “an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to...

[The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era: An Intellectual History by Carli N. Conklin; University of Missouri Press; 254 pp., $40.00] The intellectual roots of the American founding and in particular the Declaration of Independence have long been a matter of debate. Over the years, several major interpretations emerged. The first and most venerable...

Many Americans probably think that the Pledge of Allegiance dates to the time of the American Revolution, but it was written more than a century later, in 1892.  They might be shocked to learn that it was written by a Christian socialist, and the sanctifying words “under God” were not added until 1954.  But they...

Some acute scholar of future times, should there ever be such, will perhaps ponder over the very strange career of the United States Constitution—how it came, without changing a word, to be understood almost universally to mean things it did not mean and to be used for purposes other than, and sometimes the opposite of,...

The mystery novel, to borrow a line from Original Sin, has all the virtues of its defects. “The mystery,” Baroness James explained in a recent Washington Post interview, “deals with the planned murder” and is thus confined to a certain formulaic structure in which a detective protagonist confronts an often unsavory lot of suspects, all...

A prophet and a polemicist, David Gelernter displays anything but a light touch in this attack on “imperial academia” and what it has wrought.  Like most prophets, Gelernter the polemicist hopes to be proved wrong.  Perhaps, with our culture dismantled and the “Obama­crats” in charge, the contest is over—game, set, and match.  Tennis was once...

The Germans have a word for it: Schadenfreude. It means, literally, harm-joy, and refers to the nasty but common human tendency to rejoice when harm comes to someone else. In English, we don’t have the word, but we certainly have the phenomenon. Think of the nationwide jubilation over what happened to Richard Nixon (and, incidentally,...

The rise to political prominence of former Airborne Forces General Aleksandr Lebed, and especially his emphasis on law and order as the only real basis for proceeding with reforms, has raised the specter in the Russian mind of the proverbial Man on a White Horse, the military savior whose iron-fisted rule puts the national house...