America’s Turning Point

The Civil War represents the simultaneous culmination and repudiation of the American Revolution. Four successive ideological surges had previously defined American politics: the radical republican movement that had spearheaded the revolution itself; the subsequent Jeffersonian movement that had arisen in reaction to the Federalist State; the Jacksonian movement that followed the War of 1812; and [...]

Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent

In the fall of 1989 the communist regimes of Eastern Europe collapsed, and two years later the Soviet Union itself was no more, replaced by Russia and a number of newly independent nations. Communism and its accompanying show trials, gulags, and politically oriented prosecutions, along with the faux legal system that undergirded it, supposedly disappeared. [...]

The Fourth Amendment and Faulty Originalism

“All arrests are at the peril of the party making them.” —Alexander H. Stephens, August 27, 1863 These days the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution means next to nothing. Consider, for example, the choice offered a few years ago: surveillance under routine, easy “warrants” from the drive-through FISA Court or warrantless surveillance at the whim [...]

Black Rednecks and White Liberals

In a just world Thomas Sowell would win the Nobel Prize in economics. Over several decades he has applied his exceptional skills as an economist to an array of interdisciplinary studies focusing on race, culture, and politics. And in doing so he has challenged and undermined many of the dominant ideological myths of our time. [...]

The Pernicious Nature of Victimless-Crime Laws

Laws creating victimless crimes are particularly pernicious laws. Their associated evils are essential rather than accidental; that is, their destructive properties stem from their very nature as victimless. It will soon become clear why federal judges commonly write and speak of “the drug exception” to search-and-seizure (Fourth Amendment) jurisprudence, why double agents lead double lives [...]

The Shame of Medicine: The Depravity of Psychiatry

Psychiatrists alternately deny and delight in possessing special professional skill at detecting future “dangerousness” that entitles them to the special power to incarcerate individuals they so stigmatize in prisons that masquerade as hospitals. The American legal system makes heavy use of psychiatric determinations of dangerousness, as a result of which vast numbers of Americans are deprived of liberty and, at the same time, of opportunity to demonstrate the injustice of their detention. Examples abound.

Book Reviews – September 2006

• On Political
  Equality
  by Robert A. Dahl
  Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling

• Collapse: How
  Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
  by Jared Diamond Reviewed
  by Gene Callahan

• Economic Liberties
  and the Constitution
  by Bernard H. Siegan Reviewed by George C. Leef

• Kidney for Sale by
  Owner: Human Organs, Transplantation, and the Market
  by Mark J. Cherry Reviewed by William L. Anderson

The Day the Glue Came Undone

Scenes of the devastation and suffering inflicted by Hurricane Katrina will long remain in our memories. Equally horrifying were the pictures of New Orleans residentsand policemen helping themselves to goods from stores.

Civil Liberties and Civil Commitment

Defenders of civil liberties readily recognize when some state interventions—such as censorship of the press or forced religious observances—violate civil liberties. However, many of the same defenders of civil liberties are unable or refuse to recognize when certain other state interventions—such as civil commitment—violate civil liberties.