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Written documents should be interpreted with an eye toward discerning the intent of the author. When the Constitution of the United States is the text under consideration, the relevant intentions are those of the men who drafted and ratified the document. This proposition reflects a long-established canon of construction: common-law judges as far back as...

The basic concerns of this book go well beyond detailing how the original goals of the civil rights movement have been shamelessly perverted by the courts and bureaucracy. The authors show in some detail how the courts and bureaucracy acting in tandem have endorsed quotas and set asides, policies that now make race and sex...

Bitter attacks, tenacious defenses, and great promotion—not to speak of the best TV in a generation—have made David Brock’s book on The Real Anita Hill a best-seller. As Brock admits, he proves neither Clarence Thomas’s innocence nor Anita Hill’s perfidy. But by scouring the transcript of the Senate hearings, he does show that Hill’s reputation...

“Much law, but little justice.” —Thomas Fuller With five votes around here you can do anything,” Justice William Brennan told his law clerks, thus summarizing the quintessence of Brennanism. That constitutional law is not something derived from the text, structure, and history of the various provisions of the Constitution but rather a creation of the...

Almost alone among the peoples of the world, the United States has largely been spared—at least until recently—the bitter conflicts that plague countries whose citizens do not share a common language. Since the early 17th century, immigrants from diverse backgrounds have settled here. In the past, it was understood that in exchange for enjoying opportunities...

        “Glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God.” —Psalms LXXXVII This rich and complex book is on one level the summing up of a controversy over a properly Christian, specifically Catholic, view of politics which has pitted the author, a theologian, against certain “neoconservative” thinkers, notably Richard Neuhaus, Michael...

“Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.” —Ecclesiastes 9:10 The Gilded Age still exerts a strange pull on the American imagination.  It was a time of larger-than-life people and larger-than-life business entities.  It featured conspicuous consumption—including palatial mansions, yachts, international travel, and international scandal—that seems almost to exceed anything we have...

“When family pride ceases to act, individual selfishness comes into play.” —Tocqueville “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I’ve always thought that Tolstoy underestimated the variety of happy families, but his dictum definitely holds true from at least one point of view, that of family law. While...

What is the justification for abortion?  Is abortion a moral or therapeutic concept?  Medical or legal?  Sociological or personal?  These considerations underlie Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer, a narrative of the comprehensive criminal enterprise of Kermit Gosnell, M.D., Philadelphia’s notorious baby killer and drug trafficker, by the Irish journalists Ann...