Beware of those who speak eagerly of crises. In a true crisis, we reasonably but temporarily hand our powers of practical reasoning and self-governance over to those who are most capable of diverting the threat. In an emergency, a competent executive dire ...
Slow Down the Machine Police
Suppose an intelligent machine deems you guilty of a crime. Suppose the police were to treat the machine’s judgment as evidence of your guilt. Would it matter that you are actually innocent? This hypothetical was once a plot device of dystopian novels ...
The Supreme Court Will Not Pick the President, But It Could Have a Role
The spectre of dimpled chads has emerged to haunt American politics. Twenty years after the contested presidential election of George W. Bush against Al Gore made punch lines out of certain ambiguous ballots in Florida, allegations of election irregularit ...
Who Prevents the Suspension of Civil Liberties From Becoming a “New Normal”? The Legislature.
A federal judge in Pennsylvania has ruled that state executive orders prohibiting people from gathering and carrying on their businesses are unconstitutional. The ruling contains important lessons for officials and lawmakers in other states, including Al ...
Mobile Radio: Adam MacLeod on the Supreme Court
This Tuesday, API Professorial Fellow Adam MacLeod joined the Jeff Poor Show. In the 15-minute segment, Poor and MacLeod discuss the vacancy left by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court and Trump's nomination of Judge Amy Coney Ba ...
Chick-fil-A and the Right to Seek Truth
Photo Credit: Mark Turnauckas / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) Chick-fil-A makes delicious sandwiches without beef. But not on Sundays. Owned by Christians, the company also gives away millions of dollars each year to ch ...
Higher Education’s Market Reckoning
Want to buy a college campus? Maybe you’d like to commission the services of a psychology department. Perhaps you’re hoping to hire an associate provost for diversity initiatives. If so, you’re in luck! It’s a buyer’s market. I use the word “market” adv ...
To Educate Our Children
Children often bear the worst of our challenges, and our disagreements. When Alabama public schools shut down in response to the Coronavirus pandemic, we saw (again) that the promise of education is not equally available to all young people. Many governm ...
Sharing Our Self-Governance in Emergencies
Who rules us? For centuries, the dominant American answer has been that we rule ourselves. But there are alternative views. As long as there have been human beings, some have insisted that we should not have to rule ourselves, but should be free to do wha ...