Rights

Here’s a useful FAQ on the Inquisition put together by a PhD student at Cambridge. The reputation and symbolic status of the Inquisition, it seems, has much more to do with the needs of those who appeal to the symbol than with the institution itself.

Leaving the bigotry and darkness of Old Spain for the … More ...

There was shock, horror and head-shaking in my late ’70s law school procedure class when we read a Supreme Court opinion to the effect that education wasn’t a fundamentally adversarial relationship and it didn’t make sense to insist on full adversarial procedure (notice, a hearing, right to counsel, right to confront witnessess etc.) before students … More ...

There’s some interesting history on the Supreme Court’s anti-religious turn in the last century in an article by a couple of Catholic social scientists, Is American Democracy Safe for Catholicism? It seems that the big change occurred around 1940, when the Court stopped talking about “civil liberty,” a traditional conception that recognized the common good, … More ...

The recent performance of the Supreme Court may not create confidence in those who like to think of law as a principled bulwark of republican government, but compared with some influential legal scholarship of the past 20 years it’s downright inspirational. If you don’t believe that, take a look at The Top Ten Politically Correct … More ...

The confidential memoranda I mentioned recently outlining the strategy to manipulate international law to make abortion a universal enforceable human right have been read into the Congressional Record (*.pdf file) and so are publicly available. There’s nothing particularly surprising about them, but it’s useful to have what’s going on laid out, especially in an age … More ...

I haven’t gone through the opinions in today’s McCain-Feingold decision, but was struck by an excerpt from Justice Scalia’s dissent that shows how much at odds with contemporary liberalism his views really are:

“Who could have imagined that the same court which, within the past four years, has sternly disapproved of restriction upon such inconsequential

The definition of “theocratic aggression” continues to expand, as does the battle against the ever-growing list of things treated as such:

• Robert Reich says that opposition to partial birth abortion and to the recent judicial abolition of distinctions among forms of sexual relations amounts to an attack on religious liberty by evangelicals that the Democrats

European democracy: EU bigwigs are debating a proposed new Constitution that would definitively turn the EU into a superstate, and most Europeans have never heard of the thing.

Some good citations regarding a bad trend that will be difficult to reverse without very basic changes in the understandings that govern our governors: Courting International Law.

More and more, Supreme Court justices are treating “human rights” instruments to which the United States is not a party—even instruments the United States has … More ...

If one student accepts one dollar of federal assistance his whole university becomes subject to extensive federal civil rights and affirmative action regulations. Those regulations intrude crudely into matters, like tenure decisions and the forms of expression thought to create a “hostile environment” for women and minorities, that are central to academic freedom. The public … More ...