Liberty Law Talk

This edition of Liberty Law Talk welcomes back Yuval Levin to discuss his latest book, The Fractured Republic. Levin notes that our decentralizing republic, as observed in the decades long trends in social, economic, religious, and cultural diffusion, provides both opportunities and difficulties. America’s ongoing deconsolidation from a nearly unprecedented period of national cohesion after World War II has led to numerous benefits for individual freedom and economic prosperity. However, if we are more free than ever, we may also be more alone than ever and bereft of the contexts for a responsible freedom and citizenship. And this has sparked a politics of nostalgia on both the Right and the Left with each group desiring to remake what has been lost from mid-century America. Or, as one boor continually observes, “Make American Great Again.” To these challenges, Levin addresses a series of local and personalist ideas and remedies that rely on our decentralized condition in an attempt to develop a future consensus for policies rooted in who we have become rather than a politics of nostalgia.

This conversation with Michael Anton explores how the gargantuan wealth of Silicon Valley allied with San Francisco Progressivism and is now redefining American culture and politics. But how durable is the alliance?

This interview with Wayne Crews explores the growing lawlessness in the administrative state’s exercise of its powers. This regulatory “dark matter” ignores the formal rule-making requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act that mandates publishing a notice of proposed rule-making and allowing public comment. Crews outlines how the agencies of the regulatory state are resorting to the exceptions of using “interpretative rules, general statements of policy, or rules of agency organization, procedure, or practice” to exert authority informally and without accountability.

In this Liberty Law Talk, Mary Nichols discusses her new book, Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom, which explores the idea of freedom in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. This work, which Thucydides offered as a possession for all time, permits us, Nichols observes, to consider the manifestations of freedom in both cities and individuals.

This next edition of Liberty Law Talk is with Peter Skerry on the most significant story of 2015: the European migration crisis and what it portends for the European Union and the United States.

Richard Bourke’s new book, Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke  is the subject of this new conversation at Liberty Law Talk.

Carson Holloway, author of Hamilton versus Jefferson in the Washington Administration, discusses the differing views of Hamilton and Jefferson on energetic government, limited government, the Constitution, and republican government. They debate on national debt, views on the Constitution, powers of the federal government, differences in views on liberty and order, and the impact of conflicts on their political careers.

Christopher DeMuth, the great conservative authority on regulatory policy, comes to Liberty Law Talk to discuss his recent work on the institutional decline of congress and how it can return to its place of constitutional prominence.

This next podcast is with criminal law expert Frank Zimring, author of The City That Became Safe: New York’s Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control, on the state of policing, crime, and sentencing in America. We discuss the revolution in policing and criminal deterrence in New York and what it has meant overall for criminal justice in America. In addition, our conversation focuses on recent efforts to reform state and federal sentencing laws.

This edition of Liberty Law Talk features a discussion with George Mason Law School Professor David Bernstein on his recently released book, Lawless: The Obama Administration’s Unprecedented Assault on the Constitution and the Rule of Law.