Sublime

Locke’s breakthrough — unimagined even by Christian thinkers as formidable as Thomas Aquinas — was to combine the classical view of natural law with the concept of inalienable rights. In his Two Treatises of Government (1689), Locke identified these rights as “life, liberty, and property.” He drew from the Scriptures, as well as from Cicero, to

Summarizing in the Constitutional Convention the ends that would be served by this proposed upper house of Congress, Madison said they were “first to protect the people against their rulers; secondly to protect the people against the transient impressions into which they themselves might be led.”

Deux dangers principaux menacent l’existence des démocraties. L’asservissement complet du pouvoir législatif aux volontés du corps électoral. La concentration, dans le pouvoir législatif, de tous les autres pouvoirs du gouvernement14. »

“open parliament” movement, experimenting with a range of ways to make parliamentary procedures transparent to the public and experimenting with innovative voting methods.

Two legal systems dominate the world of global capital: English common law and the laws of New York State.

Even the most inventive, aggressive, and original legal argument is constructed upon that which came before—prior court cases, constitutions, and existing statutes and regulations.

People who assure you that you can only gain security at the price of liberty usually want to deny you both.

nineteenth-century abolitionist Lysander Spooner, whose 1869 essay “The Constitution of No Authority”

The coat of constitutional mail bolted around the Senate was sturdy indeed—by design. Under the new Constitution, the power of the executive and the power of the people would be very strong. So to enable the Senate to stand against these powers—to stand against them for centuries to come—the framers of the Constitution made the Senate very strong.