Articles

Constituting America is running a series of brief essays explaining the constitutional amendments. Over the next few days I join the conversation, discussing some of the lesser-known provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. You can read my first contribution here. Other participants include W.B. Allen, Allison Hayward, and John Lott. … ...

It has been widely reported that the University of Texas has decided to forgo representation from the Texas Attorney General’s Office in Fisher.  Instead, the University is going to spend $1 million on outside counsel.  That price tag is for one opposition brief and the oral argument.  Doesn’t one million dollars seem a bit high?  ...

The California Coastal Commission is known as being exceptionally antagonistic toward private property rights, an attitude embodied in the Commission’s late executive director Peter Douglas.  Charles Lester, Douglas’s successor, recently spoke in Humboldt County before a large audience of government officials and environmental activist ...

Last week, the Supreme Court of Washington decided not to review the appellate opinion in Thun v. City of Bonney Lake.  The Thun case arose out of the city’s denial of property owner Karl Thun’s application to develop condos on his property in Bonney Lake, Washington.  Thun sued the city under the theory that the … ...

Prof. Lee Strang has published an article in the University of Detroit Mercy Law Review arguing that Justice Antonin Scalia is  more faithful to the doctrine of “original intent” than is Justice Clarence Thomas. The argument, though, seems pretty strange to me. Strang’s logic is as follows: the original intent of the framers was ...

So says a recent survey of business leaders published in Chief Executive Magazine.  I don’t think that this should surprise anyone.  After all, a state with such property-infringing agencies as the California Coastal Commission and the California Air Resources Board is not going to be particularly hospitable to productive activity.  On the ...

After the Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania finished spending millions of dollars to modernize its two high schools, it decided to “equalize” student attendance.  District planners intended to force the same number of students to enroll at each school by redistricting the school assignment zones.  Parents and students were ...

The latest on the possible listing of the dunes sagebrush lizard under the Endangered Species Act. … ...

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal included this article by Peter Berkowitz asking why it is that college and even graduate students today don’t study The Federalist Papers. I’m not sure what the situation is in America’s “leading” institutions of higher education, but it’s certainly true that most students in ...