Repeal and Replace Today’s Education Cartel
Law & Liberty
by Scott Yenor
3h ago
Our current education system (higher ed joined with K-12) was born in the Progressive Era. Before 1900, American education was, as progressives say, the Wild West. Many different kinds of grammar and secondary schools bloomed, including what we now call K-12 systems, but also prep schools, boarding schools, trade schools, simple K-8 schools, homeschools, country schools. Compulsory schooling laws, started in Massachusetts in 1852, barely extended past primary schools until well after the Civil War. America’s higher education contained diverse pathways as well. Most colleges followed the classi ..read more
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Bootleggers, Baptists, and Fertility Clinics
Law & Liberty
by Andrew Morriss
1d ago
The Alabama Supreme Court held in LePage v. The Center for Reproductive Medicine, P.C. that the parents of embryos created through in vitro fertilization could bring a statutory wrongful death claim when the clinic where their embryos were stored allowed the destruction of the parents’ embryos by an intruder. The decision prompted a firestorm of stories seemingly written to frighten Americans that fertility treatments were under threat. “The Fight over I.V.F. Is Only Beginning” (The New Yorker) and “The Beginning of a Bad TRIP—Alabama’s Embryonic Personhood Decision and Targeted Restrictions o ..read more
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A Classical Liberal’s Guide to Civilization-Building
Law & Liberty
by Samuel Gregg
1d ago
The word “civilization” is unfashionable in our times. It implies a contrast, and that contrast is uncomfortable. If some societies have attained a cultural level that merits this designation, it may follow that other societies are less civilized or—worse—even barbarous. For many people today, making any such value-judgment is simply unacceptable.  Those who maintain that such distinctions can and should be made are usually labeled conservative, even traditionalist in their outlook. However, specific ideas about the nature of civilization have been taken quite seriously by key classical l ..read more
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Breeding Immortal Beings
Law & Liberty
by Rachel Lu
1d ago
There is a famous story about Elizabeth Anscombe, which kept drifting into my mind as I read Catherine Ruth Pakaluk’s new book, Hannah’s Children. Anscombe was an Oxford professor, a high-profile analytic philosopher, and also a mother of seven. People sometimes had opinions about that, and the story goes that she came into her classroom one day (pregnant with her seventh) to find that some mean-spirited troll had written the words “ANSCOMBE BREEDS” on her chalkboard. Calmly, without apparent embarrassment, she picked up the chalk and added two words. “ANSCOMBE BREEDS IMMORTAL BEINGS.”  P ..read more
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A Plea Against State Court Activism
Law & Liberty
by Trey Dimsdale
2d ago
A recent New York Times headline was itself almost as instructive and revealing as the article that followed. “The Quiet Way Democrats Hope to Expand Their Power at the State Level” details a strategy adopted by the Democratic Governors Association to support the campaigns of Democratic gubernatorial candidates who will have the opportunity to appoint state court judges in the next term if they win. Democrats, the article claims, are “locked out of power on the Supreme Court and still playing catch-up against Republicans in the federal judiciary.” State courts represent, according to the artic ..read more
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Embracing Scylla and Charybdis
Law & Liberty
by Jack Andrews
2d ago
On October 7, 2023, thousands of Jews were raped, tortured, kidnapped, and killed by terrorists. For many, what was most striking about the attacks was not that Hamas hated Jews, but the reaction in the West. Antisemitic attacks and harassment have reached levels unseen in decades, and many Westerners seem either willfully ignorant or tacitly supportive of Israel’s enemies. Many intellectuals who do important work highlighting sexual assault and the burden of coming forward as a victim are at the same time downplaying or outright denying the mass rape of Jewish women on October 7. “Believe all ..read more
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A Healthy Culture in a Healthy Economy
Law & Liberty
by Paul Mueller
3d ago
A specter is haunting capitalism – the specter of “higher” things.  Or so an increasing number of thinkers among the New Right, the National Conservatives, or the Economic Nationalists might say. They insist that the “neoliberal” order of free enterprise and free trade has failed to deliver cultural and spiritual goods – and even economic goods – to large swaths of Americans. In their view, free enterprise capitalism built on a constitutionally limited rule of law lacks soul; and so we need “common good capitalism” or even “common good constitutionalism.” But defenders of free enterprise ..read more
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Discombobulated Establishmentarianism
Law & Liberty
by John C. Pinheiro
3d ago
Does conservatism need to be religious? The Sharon statement, drawn up for Young Americans for Freedom in 1960 at William F. Buckley Jr.’s home, decided this question in the affirmative. It related liberty to our “God-given free will,” “transcendent values,” and “eternal truths.” The Sharon Statement recognized the connection between economic and political liberty and identified global communism as the greatest threat to both, in the United States and the world. Tradition-minded conservatives and libertarians both embraced the statement and thus the clear parameters for the so-called Cold War ..read more
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Human Dignity and the Politics of Dune
Law & Liberty
by Kody W. Cooper
6d ago
Dune: Part Two is a blockbuster worthy of the name. Earning over $200 million dollars so far at the box office, it is the highest-grossing film of 2024, and proof that, in the era of superhero film fatigue—as well as the failure of storytelling that characterized Disney’s Star Wars trilogy—there is a real opening to attract audiences with new and interesting stories and adaptations in the space opera genre. Frank Herbert’s son Brian argued that Dune is to science fiction as Lord of the Rings is to fantasy, which naturally invites a comparison of the film adaptations. It is similar in ambition ..read more
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Constituting a New People
Law & Liberty
by David Conway
6d ago
For the past half-century, running alongside the bloody conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has been a less widely known, but closely related scholarly dispute, no less bitter or seemingly any less intractable. This second dispute concerns the so-called “historicity” of the Hebrew Bible. What is meant by this expression is the extent to which the events and characters depicted in the Bible are historically genuine or mere fabrications of the religious imagination. A new book by Jacob L. Wright, professor of Hebrew Bible at Emory University, entitled Why the Bible Began: An Altern ..read more
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