Posts Tagged Constitution

When Will We Ever Learn?

There was an anti-war song from the sixties that I always loved, titled “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” The refrain was “oh, when will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?” I’ve thought about that refrain a lot lately, as America has increasingly retreated into one of the ugliest nativist episodes in a [...]

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Void for Vagueness

One of the most difficult constitutional principles to teach, for reasons I really don’t understand, is the rule that in order to be constituional, a law must be sufficiently precise to allow citizens to know what behaviors will be sanctioned. If a law does not meet that standard, we say it is “void for vagueness.” [...]

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Defining Our Terms

I was going through a file earlier today, and came across an entry I wrote a couple of years ago for the Encyclopedia of the Constitution. My task was to define “civil liberty.” Sometimes, it’s good to remind ourselves what our civil liberties are–and why they matter. Here’s what I wrote: Civil liberty is the [...]

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