Every clause and article of the United States Constitution has been studied, pored over, and interpreted countless times--every one, that is, but the Ninth Amendment, which until very recently, has stood in lonely splendor, unacknowledged, uninterpreted, ignored. And yet, since it is part of the Bill of Rights, one would think it deserving of some
David H. Mitchell is a young man charged, and now convicted, in Federal Court with failing to report for induction into the armed forces. Refusing to cooperate with the system by becoming an officially recognized conscientious objector, Mitchell decided to turn the court proceedings into an indictment of his accusers, the United States government.
Julian Bond, a brilliant young leader of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), having been duly elected to the Georgia state legislature from Atlanta, dared to endorse SNCC’s statement attacking conscription and the American war in Vietnam. In so doing, Mr. Bond indelibly stamped himself as a ‘bad” Negro in the eyes of his legislative
The case of David H. Mitchell, the young man who is challenging-the very basis of the conscription law, was treated in our previous issue (Conrad J. Lynn, “The Case of David Mitchell versus the United States.” LEFT AND RIGHT (Autumn. 1965)). On January 13, 1966, the United States Court of Appeals unanimously reversed David Mitchell’s conviction in
Lysander Spooner has many great distinctions in the history of political thought. For one thing, he was undoubtedly the only constitutional lawyer in history to evolve into an individualist anarchist; for another, he became steadily and inexorably more radical as he grew older. From the time that Benjamin R. Tucker founded the scintillating
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.