“Let us endeavor to make the best of that which is allotted to us and, by finding out both its good and its evil tendencies, be able to foster the former and repress the latter to the utmost.”[1] This was Alexis de Tocqueville’s endeavor in his famed, Democracy in America. He had surmised a providential [...]
Citizens United not only constituted a break from recent tradition that overturned multiple presents but, even more troublingly, it issued a broad re-understanding of the idea of free speech — a corrupted and dangerous interpretation of our first freedom.
Does speech really operate in the same kind of marketplace as commercial goods? Are campaign advertisements equatable to iPods? The “marketplace of ideas” is a popular legal and even colloquial exposition of the first amendment, but we must assess how easily the Forum could be called the Agora.
On the brilliance and meaning of JFK’s Inaugural. His oratory refocused the American system on its founding principles, while expanding them to confront the current crises. With a keen awareness of his audience and breathtaking use of prose, he crafted a concise, but effective speech. More than anything, he set the tone for his administration, not as lofty idealism, but as purposeful realism.
Jurisprudence should move past interpreting the text for the text’s sake, but for the sake of democracy, properly understood, so we will no longer be stuck in the moral world of the 18th century, but free to follow our own moral compass—magnetized by deliberation and consensus—towards a better realization of our most common democratic belief, the right to self-rule.
amateur mini-golfer and poor man's hacker. currently coding for america.
