America has at last been made painfully aware of the sweeping adoption, and consequences, of "stand your ground" laws. Now on the books in roughly half of the states, these laws allow citizens to meet force with force when threatened in public places, replacing the long-preferred option of safe retreat....

Johns Hopkins University political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg is one cranky faculty member -- but not without reason. In his recently published screed, The Fall of the Faculty, he paints a disturbing picture of American higher education. Ginsberg's chief accusation (and complaint) is that while universities were once...

The intrepid New York Times reporter Charlie Savage has again provided an indispensable service by turning his reporter's eye to how the Republican presidential candidates view presidential power, replicating his important reporting on the same subject during the last presidential cycle. Savage's interview with then-presidential...

The death of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, followed within a day by Pres. Obama's announcement that U.S. forces will be gone from Iraq by December, should be a stop-and-pause moment for all Americans. In both cases, two brutal dictatorships came to an end. But the similarities end...

Here's an assignment for September 17, Constitution Day: imagine a very different Constitution -- one where, for example, Congress could kill any state law, where a twenty-six member Senate controlled treaty-making with other nations, and where the president's veto was exercised jointly with the Supreme Court. These...

Once upon a time, there was a presidential candidate named Harold Stassen. The one-time Minnesota governor sought the Republican presidential nomination eleven times, from 1948 to 2000. While his first bid was serious and competitive, he soon became something of a joke, an aging "Boy Wonder," known only as a...

No one is always wrong, including former Bush administration lawyer and Berkeley law professor John Yoo. Yoo was right when he wrote in the Wall Street Journal on March 25 that Obama "flip-flopped" when the then-senator said in 2007 that presidents lacked the constitutional power "to unilaterally...

In the upside-down world of gun politics, momentum to allow civilian gun carrying on college campuses has accelerated in recent months. Only Utah has allowed the practice so far, but the effort is now proceeding in a dozen states, led by Texas and, ironically,

Sometimes it takes a catastrophic event for people to appreciate what they have. Case in point: the vicious and despicable assassination attempt against Arizona Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

There is no excuse for the attack, or for the level of venom directed against Rep. Giffords and others in recent...

Like most previous presidents, including, most recently, Bill Clinton in 1995 and George W. Bush in 2007, Barack Obama will face a partisan landscape sloped more heavily against him when the 112th Congress convenes on January 5. Like every president since Nixon, he will emphasize administrative means...

Mr. President, your October 7 announcement that you plan to veto a bill that has as its stated, and seemingly unexceptional purpose, of streamlining the recognition of notarized statements across state lines will be welcomed by consumer groups and others who fear that the bill would make it...

Pity poor John Barron. The Baltimore businessman found his business -- a wharf where ships docked -- ruined when the city's public works improvements resulted in the depositing of sand, gravel, and dirt off of the wharf and into the bay. The city refused to compensate Barron for his loss,...

The upsurge in gun rights protests in recent days has been accompanied by a term you've probably heard before: militias. Self-identified groups like the Michigan Militia and the Arizona Citizens Militia have received more than their share of attention in recent months. Added to that list is another...

Democratic Representative Bart Stupak's April 9 announcement that he would not seek re-election from Michigan's First Congressional District, coming as it does on the heels of his pivotal role in passage of President Obama's health care reform package, will forever tie him to that iconic legislative moment. First

You've heard the census naysayers, the Michelle Bachmanns, the Glenn Becks, the Tea Party movement activists who are calling for a "partial boycott" that urges people to only report the number of persons in their households. Some are calling for an outright boycott. The commonly cited reasons coalesce around charges...

Dear Mr. President, I, along with many other Americans, applaud your willingness to break with the bad practices of your predecessors, especially those of your immediate predecessor. Just last week, for example, your executive order and accompanying memorandum to agency heads directing that agencies overhaul their documents classification procedures will...