Let's think about whether all acts of Congress deserve our respect and obedience. Suppose Congress enacted a law — and the Supreme Court ruled it constitutional — requiring American families to attend church services at least three times a month. Should we obey such a law? Suppose Congress, acting under the Constitution's commerce claus...

The chief justice of the United States and I attended the same high school. I arrived on campus two years after he had left. He was a legend by then, already in his last year at Harvard College, where he graduated summa cum laude in three years. People still talked about him. Roberts' math teacher told us he would ping pebbles off Roberts' dorm win...

Is President Obama such a die-hard leftist ideologue that he can't get it right on judicial review, despite having time to reflect and regroup after his impertinent comments designed to intimidate the court? As everyone knows, Obama said Monday, "Ultimately, I'm confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, ext...

Anyone who's had a casual conversation with his neighbors or is cognizant of reality TV should already be petrified of democracy. But if the Supreme Court — or, as Barack Obama likes to refer to them, an "unelected group of people" — overturns Obamacare's individual mandate, the president says that the court would be taking &q...

One of the highly developed talents of President Barack Obama is the ability to say things that are demonstrably false, and make them sound not only plausible but inspiring. That talent was displayed just this week when he was asked whether he thought the Supreme Court would uphold ObamaCare as constitutional or strike it down as unconstitutional. ...

Is not doing something the same as doing it, and should government be allowed to force you not to do the thing you're already not doing by making you do it so you don't not do it anymore? That is just one of the perplexing legal questions the Supreme Court will likely find a way to say "yes" to in July after it wrestles with the constit...

In the glossy pages of The New Yorker, in graceful prose and with good reporting, the dreams and nightmares of the admirers of Barack Obama and his policies lie exposed. The dreams include Ryan Lizza's report last April in which he quoted an Obama adviser as saying the president's policy on Libya was "leading from behind." This week, as T...

Loyal readers know that I have been calling attention to a range of Second Amendment issues in the past week. In last week's column here, I wrote about the scandals and illegitimate regulations emanating from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. In another outlet, I documented the threat to our rights that is posed by the United...

In 1986, Tim Cole, a student at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for a rape he did not commit. He was exonerated in 2009, a decade after he died behind bars from a severe asthma attack at the age of 39. Like three-quarters of the defendants who are cleared by DNA evidence, Cole was convicted based on sincere yet...

What laws are we morally obligated to obey? Help with the answer can be found in "Economic Liberty and the Constitution," a 66-page pamphlet by Jacob G. Hornberger, founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. Hornberger offers a hypothetical whereby Congress enacts a compulsory church attendance law that requires children t...