Liberty Law Talk

This discussion with Steven Smith, author of Modernity and Its Discontents, explores what it means to be modern and why an age that has produced so many gains and advances has also produced so many counter-enlightenments and apocalyptic responses. To love the modern age well, do we need to love it moderately?

There is nothing more arduous than the apprenticeship of liberty, Tocqueville informs. While equality in modern democratic society is a natural tendency—one that grows without much effort—it is liberty that requires a new defense in each generation. In this spirit the next edition of Liberty Law Talk discusses with Gordon Lloyd the Liberty Narrative and its unending contest with the Equality Narrative.

Author John Lawrence Hill discusses the necessity of natural law for freedom. Topics include Justice Kennedy's redefinition of liberty in abortion rights, defense of classical natural law over modern rights, importance of natural law principles in legal crises like Nuremberg trials, shift to utilitarianism in American jurisprudence, challenges to constitutional law and negative rights, and the debate between individualism and collectivism in constitutional rights.

Is America in a constitutional crisis or is the country already post-constitutional and merely adjusting to a regime of quasi-law? Bruce Frohnen joins this edition of Liberty Law Talk to discuss this question and his latest book, coauthored with the late George Carey, Constitutional Morality and the Rise of Quasi-Law.

The great Polish political theorist, anti-communist thinker and member of Solidarity, Minister of Education, Secretary of State in the Chancellery of the late President Lech Kaczynski, and Deputy Speaker of the Senate, and current member of the European Parliament, Ryszard Legutko, joins this edition of Liberty Law Talk to discuss his latest book, The Demon in Democracy.

As the author of numerous influential histories of religion in America, Mark Noll is considered to be the master historian of this subject. In this edition of Liberty Law Talk, Mark Noll joins us to discuss his latest book, In the Beginning Was the Word. Noll describes how the Bible shaped the foundation of public life in early America. He traces this influence directly in the Puritan biblical commonwealths in New England, to the narrow and intense Protestantism unleashed by the First Great Awakening, and the ways both Loyalists and independence-minded colonists used scripture during the Revolutionary War.

John Inazu has emerged as one of the leading scholars on freedom of association and religious freedom. His earlier book, Liberty’s Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly revived our understanding of the significance of freedom of association in American constitutional history. He joins us in this episode of Liberty Law Talk to discuss his latest book, Confident Pluralism on why we must rebuild both the legal and civic engagement aspects of a pluralist society.

Sandy Levinson joins this edition of Liberty Law Talk for a conversation about his latest book, An Argument Open to All: Reading The Federalist in the 21st Century.

This episode of Liberty Law Talk is a conversation with congressional scholar Louis Fisher on his recent book, Congress: Protecting Individual Rights. Fisher argues that contrary to popular belief, Congress, not the Court, has been the foremost champion in protecting the rights of racial minorities, children, Native Americans, and religious liberties.

This next edition of Liberty Law Talk is a conversation with Joshua Dunn on a new book that he has co-authored with Jon Shields entitled Passing on the Right. Dunn and Shields interviewed 153 professors across a range of disciplines who consider themselves conservatives and libertarians. Their findings paint a more moderate position on the types of challenges conservative academics face compared to much conventional thinking on this subject. Evidence that they are the victims of a systematic campaign of exclusion and persecution doesn’t seem to exist. What does seem to exist is a host of other problems that must be carefully navigated. For example, many interviewees report self-censoring their comments and publications in various ways in order to receive tenure or other opportunities. But Dunn also reports that conservatives in the academy have found ways to get hired, obtain tenure, and thrive.