Liberty and the judicial activism debate

I had the honor of moderating a debate at Cato on Thursday between Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, author most recently of Cosmic Constitutional Theory: Why Americans Are Losing Their Inalienable Right to Self-Governance, and the Cato Institute’s Roger Pilon on the proper role of restraint and energy in judicial protection of constitutional liberty. It was a scintillating discussion and you can watch it above, or at this Cato link.

2 Comments

  • As of right now, Amazon reports but 14 copies in stock. With “more coming.”

    A book on constitutional law goes into a second printing? Glory be!

  • And of course, one way of taking away Americans’ ability for self-rule is to pretend to find constitutional justifications for social issues the constitution doesn’t even mention such as abortion and same sex marriage, while at the same time completely ignoring inconvenient things in the Constitution like right to keep and bear arms and freedom of association. Much as some want a court ruling at the federal level for same-sex marriage, supporters of civil recognition of same sex marriage did it the right way by winning the referenda in Md and Me, and are doing it the wrong way by making a federal case out of Ca prop 8.