Tag: democratic society
The Supreme Court Justice Who Championed Judicial Restraint
In September 1953, with the Supreme Court only months away from rehearing oral argument in Brown v. Board of Education, Justice Felix Frankfurter received word while vacationing in Massachusetts that Chief Justice Fred Vinson had died suddenly of a heart attack. Returning to Washington so that he could attend Vinson’s funeral, Frankfurter bumped into his former law clerk Philip Elman in Union Station. Frankfurter did not exactly appear staggered by grief. To the contrary, Elman observed the
Canadian Truckers Polarize American Commentators
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely, intriguing conversations and solicits reader responses to one question of the moment. Every Friday, he publishes some of your most thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
With another Valentine’s Day just behind us, I’m reminded of the profound changes in social conceptions of love, marriage, sex, and romance across centuries, and the smaller changes that I’ve witnessed personally during
The Fight for Democracy Will Be a Long, Long Haul
The fault lines of today’s political chasm go back to the decades that preceded the Civil War. One can see them in our geography—most of the states that will recriminalize abortion, for example, are in the old Confederacy and the rural or deindustrialized regions it influenced—and in our racial division, which continues to render the country into, more or less, two camps.
A democratic society might resolve its conflicts by counting heads. But the rigid Constitution, written to protect the