Blog Posts

"And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free," Jesus is reported to have said. Somehow, I don’t think he foresaw just how much a threat the truth could be in the courtrooms of the United States. Why knowing the truth just got one juror fined $500 in the New Jersey...

In the Roman Coliseum the crowd voted thumbs up, or thumbs down based on the performance they had just witnessed. Life or death depended on the fancy of a mob who had come out to view blood sport. I wonder how different we are today.
There is no dispute of fact about what caused the death of...

"The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation," wrote Albert Jay Nock in Our Enemy, The State. His words haunted me as I researched just who owns New Haven’s Green today. The records of New Haven Colony and Plantation in the...

Regular readers of this column – all three of you, but I exaggerate – have no doubt intuited the manner in which topics are selected each week. It goes something like this: "Oh, [expletive deleted], it’s Thursday. I better come up with something." I generally have no larger...

How strangers acquire not just the power but the right to make rules others must obey is a central preoccupation of political philosophers. Grand theories of legitimacy spring from the brows of such giants as Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke and Hegel. It is rare that we get a ground’s eye...

By the time my parents arrived in North America, all the land was taken. There wasn’t any left to claim. The continent, from one end to the other, belonged either to private owners, the government or to Indians on reservations. We walked onto a playing field owned by others, and, like most...

I am profoundly ambivalent about American history. We tell ourselves that ours is a history of inclusion, yet we gloss over the acts of theft and genocide that drove the natives off the land. And never mind the periodic bouts of xenophobia from which we suffer. Or the tragic history of slavery and...

If you are not from New England, odds are you don’t understand the significance of a town green. It is a city’s center, a haven, if you will, from the particular cares and concerns dividing a community. The town green is where the people can and do meet. New England towns typically have...

Everyone, it seems, wants to be a pundit. That includes J. Harvie Wilkinson, III, a federal appellate judge and one-time contender for a seat on the United States Supreme Court. Judge Wilkinson decries the fact that we debate endlessly in this country the scope and meaning of the federal...

Michelle Alexander writes in this morning’s New York Times about mass incarceration and plea bargaining. She wonders what would happen if defendants everywhere organized and refused to bargain. That would collapse the criminal justice system, wouldn’t it? Imagine prosecutors having to...