‘Ignorance of the law is no excuse.’ So say the legal textbooks, the judge’s rulings, and all the cavalcade of legal orthodoxy. Yet on the face of it, this seems unjust. How can I be accountable to a law I
Men always want more power. Separation of powers, as Montesquieu laid it out, is a means of playing this cupidity against itself. The American implementation is not so focused on the balancing of classes as Montesquieu was (albeit some element
The First Amendment’s Establishment Clause must compete with another famous definition of the American government’s proper relationship with the church: Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists, wherein he wrote of a “wall of separation between church and state” (Dreisbach).
Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book II: Of the Rights of Things commences with a brief discussion of the origin of property. Therein he states, quite rightly, that the Dominion Mandate of Genesis 1:28 is “the only true