Philip Wallach has posed a worthwhile challenge to my argument that a return to the “politics of truth and virtue that built the West” will help us restore our political order. In his Law Liberty essay, “Do We Need a ‘Politics of Truth,’” Wallach rejects my distinction between a politics of truth and a politics of utility as a “category...

　　Israel’s war with Hamas is reaching its final stages. At the moment all eyes are fixed on Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, but however the end game plays out, the IDF should soon have its victory. Hamas’ destruction, itself a cause for rejoicing, will have cost somewhere in the vicinity of thirty thousand lives. Now the political-theoretical rubber meets the road....

　　The great increase in human life expectancy during the twentieth century is often cited as proof that humanity’s lot is rapidly improving. On average, an infant born in 1900 could expect to live to about 32 years, while by 2000, life expectancy had reached 65 years. By contrast, alarm bells sounded when American life expectancy declined in the first years...

　　The most important and frequently cited case in administrative law is Chevron v. NRDC—a case mandating judicial deference to legal interpretations by administrative agencies. This year the Court is likely either to overrule it directly or hollow it out significantly. The rise and fall of Chevron is a fascinating story both jurisprudentially and for me personally. As an intern in...

　　One of the most frequent subjects of debate within the American political system is, how easy or difficult should it be for someone to vote? On one hand, it seems that making it easier to vote will increase voter participation, which is generally a good thing in a functioning democracy. On the other hand, some people believe that if voting...

　　It took only a few days following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel for considerable anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment as well as vandalism and attacks on persons to emerge in the US as well as other parts of the world. There was indeed sympathy and support for Israel but also a striking amount of vitriol and undisguised anti-Semitism—continuing even...

　　Americans’ confidence in our higher education system is at a historic low. According to a Gallup poll this summer, only 36 percent have real faith in our colleges and universities. After the ugly resurgence of antisemitism on campuses in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel, and some administrations’ inaction, many donors and alumni stand in open revolt. It is...

　　The US Supreme Court recently decided to hear an appeal from the notoriously-liberal Ninth Circuit, in a 2023 case entitled City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, which effectively ruled in the tongue-in-cheek words of the Wall Street Journal that there is a “constitutional right to vagrancy.” Many observers believe that the Court will use the Grants Pass case as an...

　　Between the ongoing war in Gaza and Houthi attacks on Western shipping in the Red Sea, the media has had plenty of gruesome foreign policy fodder for the content mill. However, this coverage has come at the expense of the ongoing grinding conflict in Ukraine, which has quickly gone from a euphoric cause célèbre to a now embarrassing catastrophe that...

　　Friedrich Hayek remarked in the original preface to the 1944 publication of The Road to Serfdom that, “This is a political book.” Hayek was an academic economist who had argued with John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s regarding his Treatise on Money, and published The Pure Theory of Capital 1941, among other earlier works. But now he had become embroiled...

　　Canada is normally so mild-mannered that our biggest recent national scandal involved the House of Commons rising to greet a Ukrainian war veteran whom the Speaker introduced as a hero “who fought against the Russians” and politely applauding before realizing in horror that fighting “against the Russians” meant alongside the Waffen-SS. But for a few fevered weeks in the winter...

　　Good fiction, especially science fiction, can be prophetic, not because the writer has some mystical way of reading the future, but because, as Southern Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor once wrote, “prophecy is a matter of seeing near things with their extensions of meaning and thus of seeing far things close up.” Audiences turned out in record numbers this past summer...