Book Review: Liberalism at the Crossroads. by Christopher Wolfe and John Hittinger.

Book review: Liberalism at the Crossroads. By Christopher Wolfe and John Hittinger. Rowman and Littlefield: Lanham, MD. 1994. Pp. ix-183. Reviewed by: Michael Zuckert

Thinkin’ about Lincoln

"I have chosen my title not merely for its poetic qualities, but because it points us in the right direction on Lincoln: he supplies matter for thinking beyond any other figure of our national life.1 Something of why this is so is suggested by Woodrow Wilson, who looked back to Lincoln in order to understand what Lincoln’s greatness implied for the challenges the U.S. and Wilson himself faced in the early twentieth century. On the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth Wilson asked his audience: Have you ever looked at some of those singular statues of the great French sculptor Rodin – those pieces of marble in which only some part of a figure is revealed and the rest is left in the hidden lines of the marble itself; here there emerges the arm and the bust and the eager face, it may be, of a man, but his body is appears in the general bulk of the stone, and the lines fall off vaguely?"(...

Legality and Legitimacy in \u3cem\u3eDred Scott\u3c/em\u3e: The Crisis of the Incomplete Constitution

The original Constitution was incomplete in that it contained a disparity between the principles of legitimacy of the system and the legality of the institution of slavery. Political communities marked by such disharmony are beset with pressures to make the system consistent in one way or another. Such indeed was the fate of the U.S. during the antebellum era. Three typical responses arose: to make legality correspond to legality (by redefining the principles of legitimacy of the system), to make legality conform to legitimacy (by doing away with slavery), or to maintain the tension in ever more creative ways. The Dred Scott case represents a late stage of this dynamic process—seven of the Justices chose one or another version of the legality-over-legitimacy strategy, one chose a nascent version of the legitimacy-over-legality position, and only one worked to reaffirm the original constitutional tension between legality and legitimacy

Book Review: Individuals and Their Rights. by Tibor Machan.

Book review: Individuals and Their Rights. By Tibor Machan. LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court Publishing Co. 1989. Pp. xviii, 250. Reviewed by: Michael Zuckert

Book Review: Louis D. Brandeis. by Philippa Strum; Brandeis and Frankfurter. by Leonard Baker.

Book review: Louis D. Brandeis. By Philippa Strum. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1984. Pp. xv, 508 ; Brandeis and Frankfurter. By Leonard Baker, New York: Harper and Row. 1984. Pp. 567. Reviewed by: Michael P. Zuckert