Contributions by:

Jerome Braun

Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution, By Stephen Breyer

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Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has published a book on judicial philosophy that achieves notice less because of its content than because of the author’s post. The book argues for a “sociological” approach to legal interpretation, which Breyer admits has many rivals in approaches based on direct interpretation of legal language, on historical analysis of…

Review: Frances Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.

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Francis Fukuyama, former deputy director of the State Department’s policy planning staff, follows up his last book on Political Order and Political Decay with a book that relates personal identity to political identity, entitled Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. He is the author of The End of History and the…

Review: Eric Foner, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution W. W. Norton, 2019 and Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West Columbia University Press, 2019

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Eric Foner, Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, is known for his writing on the culprit values which led to the American Civil War, in his Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (1995), and for tracing the success and failures that came afterward, in…