Canada’s decision to permit same sex-marriage and the recent Supreme Court decision striking down anti-sodomy laws have once again filled the air with familiar conservative arguments featuring “traditional morality” and “family values.” It is a rhetoric that allows talk of …
Richard A. Posner’s Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy
Victim Compensation After 9/11
At first glance, Laurie Shrage seems to be issuing a call for moderation on all sides of the abortion debate. She makes a claim that the often vacuous posturing endemic to party politics has primed us to take at face …
Sharon Hays’s Flat Broke with Children
Assessing the United Nations
Most progressives would say the abortion debate is intractable because it reflects the huge gap between conservative Christian and secular humanist values. I’d like to offer another theory, one not incompatible with this one, but a supplement to it. The …
A New Foundation for the Transatlantic Alliance
The war in Iraq has given new urgency to the debate about “American imperialism.” In fact, there hasn’t been anywhere near enough of a debate; the term is used routinely by critics of the war and routinely rejected by its …
Lewis Coser, who died July 8 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was one of the last of an intellectual generation. This is true in the literal sense that he, along with Irving Howe, Stanley Plastrik, and a small nucleus of others, invented …
For the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union, we are engaged in a serious debate about the shape and character of global politics. What produced the debate was, first of all, the growing arrogance and recklessness of …
The Hope for a Common European Foreign Policy
This past winter, as the debate over invading Iraq intensified, I received an e-mail announcement for an “anti-war” production of Shakespeare’s Henry V being staged in Los Angeles. For people who know the play only from Laurence Olivier’s Anglo-patriotic, World-War-II-era …
Participants with birthdays between the months of July and September were told to congregate at a bar and grill off Broadway in Midtown, a few minutes before 7 p.m. and to await further instructions. When I arrived, the bar was …
States, Rights and Justice
