On Sunday, I caught the interview with Justice Antonin Scalia on Sixty Minutes. I was particularly bemused by the Justice’s discussion of whether torture — say, of the detainees at…

In my current project on the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson, I am now in the phase of chopping out those parts of the story that — though entertaining to…

The quote comes from Dylan Thomas, from “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” in Under Milkwood. The subject comes up with the death…

It’s more than two weeks late, but I do want to offer belated 216th birthday greetings to Thaddeus Stevens of Lancaster, PA. He plays a pivotal role in the book…

The major parties use a somewhat bemusing array of electoral mechanisms to choose their presidential candidates: winner-take-all primaries, caucuses, “open primaries” (any voter can vote in any party primary), “closed…

I’m looking forward to a forthcoming article in the Texas Law Review — how’s that for a sentence I never thought I’d write? The title shows a certain insensitivity to…

In writing about Henry Adams recently, I was intrigued by a perennial conversation as to what are the best political novels. The project begins with defining what is a political…

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is at it again, peddling his notion that the Constitution must have a fixed meaning as of September 1787. In remarks printed in the Washington…

Actually, there are a zillion Adamses, many of them interesting, but the one I want to talk about is Henry Adams (1838-1918), great-grandson of the President John Adams, grandson of…