In the December term of 1870, the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of a statute authorizing the issuance of U.S. notes (or “greenbacks”) and making those notes “legal tender in payment of all debts, public and private.” That statute, ...
Are economic rights and liberties among the “privileges or immunities” of citizenship protected by the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment? That was the simple question before the Supreme Court in the Slaughterhouse Cases, the opinion which is today almost uniformly denounced ...
Having considered the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the 1937 case of West Coast Hotel v. Parrish in the March 2016 issue of Future of Freedom, a case in which the jurisprudential tide turned in favor of deference to ...
If the Supreme Court’s 1905 holding in Lochner v. New York is the widely reviled embodiment of the constitutional right to freedom of contract, then West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish is its celebrated antithesis. The New Deal era ...
The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty by Timothy Sandefur (Cato Institute, 2014), 200 pages.
In his book The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to ...
The Grasping Hand: Kelo v. City of New London and the Limits of Eminent Domain by Ilya Somin (University of Chicago Press, 2015), 336 pages.
The Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in Kelo v. City of New London has ...
Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights against Progressive Reform by David E. Bernstein (University of Chicago Press, 2012), 208 pages.
David Bernstein begins his short book, Rehabilitating Lochner, by noting that “Lochner is likely the most ...
Battlefield America: The War on the American People by John W. Whitehead (SelectBooks, 2015), 352 pages.
John W. Whitehead is among the most dedicated and articulate civil libertarians of his generation. His latest book, Battlefield America: The War ...
The tragedy in South Caroline, the result of the vile acts of a murdering racist, finds the political class once again dreaming of new “gun safety reforms” — which we can safely decode as new ways to trample on ...
There is a popular narrative that treats pro-market and pro-business essentially as synonyms, thus seeing the most libertarian-leaning candidates as those most favored by major corporate interests. The idea is that big business both desires and benefits from an ...
