The Latest Breaking News from James Madison

On May 17, 2022, after weeks of negative stories on Montpelier in the national press, the foundation that operates the Virginia plantation home of James Madison finally made good on its promise to share authority with descendants of people enslaved by the man known as “the father” of the U.S.…

[This month, I'm serializing my 2003 Harvard Law Review article, The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope; I'll begin here with a slightly reordered introduction, which generally summarizes my analysis, but if you want more details, you'll get them in later posts.] Consider one classic slippery slope claim (more shortly on…

To successfully govern, the United States, like all democracies, must effectively navigate among competing ideologies. When competition is manifested by vigorous debate leading to compromise, democracy works. If, however, ideology begets hyperpartisanship, then dysfunction, paralysis or even civil war can be the result. The inevitability and pitfalls of adversarial government…

The Sun Belt was able to add four teams, avoided getting picked off, and has come out of the latest round of expansion as one of the big winners: 22 College Football Thoughts for 2022, No. 18

censure of government employees, students, professionals, and others might.

“In a word, just as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be said to have a property in his rights,” wrote James Madison, one of the founding fathers of the US Constitution and the fourth President of the United States, in his essay…