Laurence H. Tribe is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School. His books include American Constitutional Law, The Invisible Constitution, and Uncertain Justice: The Roberts Court and the Constitution (2014) with Joshua Matz. (February 2016)
A New Birth of Freedom: Human Rights, Named and Unnamed
by Charles L. Black Jr.
Most of us have long taken for granted the promise of our Constitution that certain core liberties—including the freedoms of speech, press, and religion—cannot be abridged by the states or by the federal government without extraordinary justification. A point easily forgotten is that it was not always so—that, for nearly …
To say that Justice Scalia’s methods gave him as much wiggle room as his more liberal counterparts isn’t to accuse him of anything nefarious. It does, however, undermine his claim that, unlike the supposedly more manipulable techniques followed by all of his colleagues other than Justice Thomas, his own methods tied him down to conclusions that he may have disliked but simply could not avoid.
