This post was co-authored by Akhil Amar and was first published in the Philadelphia Inquirer's Sunday, March 18th edition in conjunction with a special moot court on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act hosted by the National Constitution Center's Peter Jennings Project for Journalists and the Constitution Tuesday, March...

Back in the early 1970s, a professor at the Harvard Business School introduced a public sector case study for class discussion: the students were asked to analyze the paper flow in the office of then-U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy.

The topic being an unusual one -- studies of private enterprise, not...

In a few weeks, the Supreme Court will be hearing oral arguments in a case challenging the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration's landmark health care reform law. The big issue before the justices will be whether the law's provision for an "individual mandate" -- demanding that...

Down the hallway from where I work in the history department at West Point, cadets get to test out all kinds of new robotic machines. Occasionally, one of these contraptions comes crawling by my door, reverses itself and then goes the other way. You have seen them; they are the...

A little more than a decade ago, Edward Luttwak, the renowned military strategist, wrote a provocative essay in Foreign Affairs entitled, "Give War a Chance." The idea, in a nutshell, was this: War, while a horror, cures in a way that no brokered peace could ever cure. The...

There is a sports radio talk show host in New York City who has a simple solution for disgruntled fans: if you don't like what your team is doing, he says, stop complaining about it and vote with your wallet. Don't go to your team's games. Don't watch your team...

It is mandated by the Constitution, right there in Article II, Section 3:

[The president] shall from time to time give to Congress information on the state of the union, and recommend to their considerations measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.

Underlying Question in Texas Redistricting Case Is Whether the South Can Finally Be Said to Be Free of Its Racist Past

Is it time to finally declare Dixie "changed"? That is at the heart of the Texas redistricting decision now before the Supreme Court. The case, which went...

With the news this past weekend that Vaclav Havel, the one-time Czech president, had died, I found myself recalling a scene back in 1989, when I was lucky enough to spend a week in Prague with Havel, the leader of what eventually became known as the "Velvet Revolution" -- the...

This past week, I received one of those group e-mails -- the ones that direct you to pass the contents on to 10 more people -- on the subject of "keeping Christ in Christmas."

Now, I am for keeping Christ in Christmas as much as anyone. I especially bristle when...

It is hardly news that the Eurozone -- the European Union's cross-national monetary system - is in disrepair. But consider a richer question, one with global implications: is democracy itself in trouble?

Within a span of a few weeks, Italy has replaced its prime minister with a Harvard-trained economics professor....

About a decade ago, when the Euro was just being introduced as the new currency of a united Europe, Silvio Berlusconi sent every taxpaying family in Italy a pocket calculator along with a note in which he bade a fond farewell to the country's "beloved lira." The calculator, of course,...

If Mitt Romney becomes the Republican Party presidential nominee and unseats President Barack Obama in the 2012 election, he will be the first Mormon president, but he is far from being the first serious Mormon candidate for president.

Romney's father, the one-time Michigan governor George Romney, was briefly the front-runner...

Last week, in response to those questioning his plans to have police remove the Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg declared that "the Constitution doesn't protect tents... it protects speech and assembly."

In fact, Mayor Bloomberg's statement, while catchy, is not...

Ever since the news last May that Osama bin Laden had been killed in a spectacular raid on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, I (and many others) have wondered what that final dramatic encounter was like. We know that members of Navy SEAL team 5 climbed the stairs and saw...

My annual Vermont summer vacation has always included picture-perfect scenery, but not the constitutionaI dilemma I encountered last month at the Wildflower Inn, in Lyndonville, Vt.

Over the past five or so years, my family has stayed at the inn, which is owned and run by Jim and...

In 2008, when Sen. Barack Obama was running for president against Sen. John McCain, there were three formal televised presidential debates. The Constitution was not raised at all in the first debate or the second. In the third, it was raised three times: once when McCain said that as president...

At breakfast in Washington last week with Tom Ingram, the former chief of staff to Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander, I asked what the hot political talk was in Tennessee these days. It turns out that there is a lot of discussion around getting square with the constitution -- the 1870...

This post originally appeared on Constitution Daily

When Anders Breivik was arraigned in an Oslo court last week for his brazen acts of terrorism, it was in a hearing closed to the public and closed to the news media.

The decision to do that was based on concern...

What role has the Constitution played in the persistent argument over raising the debt ceiling? There is the Republican push for a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget (which I will address in a later post) and the Democratic argument, now abandoned, that the Fourteenth Amendment makes it unnecessary for...