Perfect justice is no doubt unattainable in this sublunary world, but whenever I gave evidence in court in a case involving tort law, I had the strong suspicion that I was participating in something deeply corrupt and corrupting. Justice, as it was administered, was a game of poker rather than a matter of truth as to who had done what...

　　The call for new or improved constitutions has become a fashionable and enthusiastic rallying cry for politicians, ideologues, and intellectuals throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The emergence of new states, revolutions, political upheavals, aspirations for salvation, crises, or defeated states seeking a fresh start are among the reasons that our modern world is increasingly populated with modern constitutions. The...

　　When I arrived at the University of Alabama almost a decade ago to begin graduate school and met the historian David Beito who would become the co-advisor on my dissertation, he was just beginning a project on Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s disregard for Americans’ civil liberties. Most critics of FDR point to Executive Order 9066 which forced 120,000 people of Japanese...

　　The Federal Reserve starts the new year with capital, properly accounted for, of negative 92 billion. How can that be? How can the world’s greatest central bank, the issuer of the world’s dominant reserve currency, be technically insolvent—and by such a huge number? 　　The answer is that the Fed has accumulated immense operating losses, which by January 3, 2024, totaled...

　　In the fall of 2023, Americans heard unwelcome news that a mutation of the Omicron virus—JN.1—was now accounting for as many as 50 percent of the new COVID-19 cases in the United States. By mid-December, hospitals across the country had reintroduced protective mask mandates for patients, staff, and visitors. For many, it was a reminder of the more than two-year...

　　Thomas Sowell’s current reputation as many conservatives’ favorite curmudgeonly economist and cultural critic may underplay his brilliance. His Basic Economics should be required reading in every survey econ course, and many consider his sociological work on race in America to be some of the best in that discipline although sociology is the furthest left of any academic discipline and therefore...

　　On December 22, as New York’s LaGuardia Airport was filled with holiday travelers, Tommy Dorfman, an actor who played a gay male on the Netflix teen drama “Thirteen Reasons Why” but then “came out” as a transgender female in 2021, held up the Delta line as “she” denounced an airplane employee for having intentionally “misgendered” her. The employee did so,...

　　Feminism is continually being redefined, and agroup ofconservative and not so traditionally conservative men and womenare now piloting another new approach. Fairer Disputations, part of the Wollstonecraft Project at the Abigail Adams Institute, publishes and compiles work by individuals that do not always agree but defend “a vision of female and male as embodied expressions of human personhood,” and affirm...

　　In a scene from his one-man-play, An Evening With C. S. Lewis, actor David Payne performs a curious limerick while impersonating the famous Christian apologist. An English author, the pseudo-Lewis opines, can produce beautiful works of literature, bathing in ink and wine. Unfortunately, none of these works are well received by critics or academics. Close to despondency, he mails his...

　　In The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America, Jeffrey Rosen undertakes to examine how leading American Founders learned from ancient writers on moral philosophy, especially the Stoics, to cultivate virtue as the means to attaining happiness. Rosen, the president of the National Constitution Center, reports that the project was...

　　The ideas of the political theorist Carl Schmitt are enjoying a revival—an unusual point of agreement between elements of the left and right. Schmitt made three striking claims. First, he argued that politics was defined by the dichotomy between friend and enemy. Second, he thought that politics interpenetrated and dominated all spheres of life from aesthetics to religion. Third, he...

　　For a number of years now pleasant young women or persons identifying as women, or with female-sounding names have been contacting me from the university’s diversity office, inviting me to attend sessions to discuss our DEI policies. Harvard has to be different, so we use the acronym EDIB, for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging our previous president Drew Faust, as...