Legal theory

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  2/26/2021
  

  The Campaign to Cancel Wokeness

  Columnist Michelle Goldberg examines the roots of the academic Critical Race Theory movement, and concludes that while its practitioners are sometimes willing to prioritize justice over free speech, the right today simply wants to suppress ideas it fears.

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• SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
  2/1/2021
  

  Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule’s Technocratic Despotism

  by Jason Blakely

  "Far from being morally and rationally superior, technocracy may be a significant contributor to our inability to properly deliberate upon our political problems."

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• SOURCE: Made by History at The Washington Post
  10/26/2020
  

  Amy Coney Barrett’s Philosophy Has Far Worse Roots Than Most Americans Know

  by Simon Gilhooley

  At the core of originalism is a fundamentally conservative effort to limit the possibilities of our constitutional order to the imagination of historical figures from the 18th century, which included racial hierarchy and support for chattel slavery.

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• SOURCE: New York Review of Books
  10/21/2020
  

  The Gonzo Constitutionalism of the American Right

  by Corey Robin

  "Conservatism has ceased to be a political project capable of creating hegemony through majoritarian means."

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• SOURCE: Duke Center for Firearms Law
  10/14/2020
  

  Amy Coney Barrett on Guns

  by Jake Charles

  A Second Amendment scholar examines the SCOTUS nominee's historical interpretation of prohibitions on individual firearm ownership, concluding that her record shows a commitment to gun rights but uncertainty about how she might rule on particular cases.

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• SOURCE: The Nation
  8/24/2020
  

  The Guardians: Does "The Resistance" Actually Want More Democracy, or Less?

  by Samuel Moyn

  Samuel Moyn warns that a leading Never Trump legal scholar is less concerned with how Trump might harm minorities than with how Trump might harm the image of rule by elites. 

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• 8/2/2020
  

  Constitutional Textualism, Slavery and Undocumented Immigrants

  by Alan J. Singer

  Just reading the Constitutional text, without context, does not help us understand what Antonin Scalia called “the fairly understood meaning of those words.”