Obama and the conservative legal movement That a president would search for judges who are ideological allies is unsurprising, to say the least. Certainly we are used to the idea that this is how presidents behave when it comes toƒ their Supreme Court nominees. President Bush vetted his nominees to the federal courts of appeals “to find those who shared ... Read More
Obama’s nominations will be liberal, but not in the conventional sense For better or for worse, people will view it as historically significant,” mused Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy on the election of the Harvard Law Review’s first black president in 1990. Less than two decades later, the student in question has once again been thrust into the spotlight of ... Read More
Well, I don’t know quite where to start. Maybe it’d be hyperbole to say that it’s the most ambitious move for liberalism* in 40 years. But maybe not. I’m certainly happy with his instincts. One particularly wonky detail was a decisive cut to farm subsidies, which he is moving to cut decisively. This will, of course, be cut from the ... Read More
Mr. or Mrs. “tired of liberal self-delusion” raises an interesting objection to my argument that the liberal state can remain metaphysically neutral while teaching only evolution and ignoring creationism/ID. He or she says, “If the state flipped a coin in these matters what you ‘think’ here might have merit.” So, does neutrality require the state to do a coin toss ... Read More
Let me leap to the defense of Damon Linker once again, partly out of appreciation for his link to our humble blog. Linker, following Rawls, thinks that we can separate issues of “mere life” from those of “the good life.” That is, the liberal state can and should address issues of common security and welfare, while leaving for its citizens ... Read More
A whole slew of conservative (or conservative-ish) writers are taking on the idea of “illiberal liberalism,” by which they mean a liberalism that tries to exclude dogmatic religious communities from respectable public debate, or which puts such restraints on those communities (by, say, forbidding them to use religious justifications for their public-policy preferences) that they are forced to lose what ... Read More
Will Wilkinson rightly diagnoses the Republican Party’s brain drain: smart people don’t want to hang around with “flag-waving moral reactionaries” no matter how much they all might agree on the godlike efficiency of the market. But he still does believe in the market, so he can’t, or hasn’t, given himself up to the Democrats just yet: “So I think my ... Read More
