Legal System

Everyone talks about the Supreme Court, but no one ever does anything about it. Many Supreme Court decisions have aroused fierce controversy within the past fifty years:

Clint Bolick, it appears, does not suffer from the vice of false modesty. Mr. Bolick attracted considerable attention owing to his opposition to Lani Guiniers nomination as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights;

As I write these lines, an American soldier, no doubt the first of many to come, has been killed while taking part in the American "peacekeeping" mission in Bosnia. Many in Congress, as well as most of the Republican candidates for President, 

This is a much more radical book than its title suggests. Criticism of quotas and affirmative action is hardly new. As the authors note, opinion polls show a vast majority of the public opposed to these programs;

During the "shutdown" of the federal government, bureaucrats were divided between "essential" and "non-essential." The designation caused enormous turmoil within agencies. People with lifetime jobs and gigantic pensions were deemed nonessential, while those holding short-term, highly paid, political positions—so-called Schedule C employees—were deemed "essential" and showed up for work every day. 

Lino Graglia, a distinguished constitutional lawyer at the University of Texas, has had it up to here with Harry Jaffa.

Cheers to the governors of Alabama and Virginia for sending back millions of dollars earmarked for the "Goals 2000" program slated to be imposed on their states' schools. After decades of federal attacks on local control, they have responded to voter demands that school centralization be halted. 

Richard Epstein's excellent book is packed full of arguments which continually engage the reader, even if they do not always compel assent. He constructs a powerful case for a free-market social order, with a strictly limited state.

There are many curious aspects to the latest flag fracas. There is the absurdity of the proposed change in our basic constitutional framework by treating such minor specifics as a flag law. There is the proposal to outlaw "desecration" of the American flag. "Desecration" means "to divest of a sacred character or office." Is the American flag, battle emblem of the U.S. government, supposed to be "sacred"? Are we to make a religion of statolatry? What sort of grotesque religion is that?

Peter Abelard confounded the readers of Sic et Non by placing side-by-side opinions of the Church Fathers that seemed contradictory, while offering no reconciliation.