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" The administration of George W. Bush, emboldened by the Sept. 11 attacks and the backing of a Republican Congress, has sought to further extend presidential power over national security. Most of the expansion has taken place in secret, making Congressional or judicial supervision particularly difficult. "

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" Every generation gets the Constitution that it deserves. As the central preoccupations of an era make their way into the legal system, the Supreme Court eventually weighs in, and nine lawyers in robes become oracles of our national identity. "

Noah Feldman

Legal

Identity

Constitution

" Given the pervasive secrecy of the Bush-Cheney administration, and the sorry consequences of that disposition, President Barack Obama's early emphasis on openness in government seems almost inevitable. "

" It seems strange to the rest of the world, but we Americans can't seem to stop talking about how other countries should be democratic like we are. "

" During the boom years of the 1990s, globalization emerged as the most significant development in our national life. With NAFTA and the Internet and big-box stores selling cheap goods from China, the line between national and international began to blur. "

" FDR's justices were allies while he was alive, but after he died, they developed four totally different theories of what the Constitution is, two of which are considered conservative and two of which are considered liberal. "

" Iraqi national identity under Saddam Hussein never truly incorporated Shiites or Kurds. Sunnis, who identified most closely with the Iraqi nation, remain in some ways disenfranchised relative to the other groups, or at least they perceive themselves that way. "

" Marriage is the most obvious public practice about which information is readily available. When combined with the traditional Jewish concern for continuity and self-preservation - itself only intensified by the memory of the Holocaust - marriage becomes the sine qua non of social membership in the modern Orthodox community. "

" To hear both critics and defenders talk about the fitness of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, you'd think the most successful Supreme Court justices had been warm, collegial consensus-builders. But history tells a different story. "

" Faced with the collapse of Iraq into something like Lebanon - or worse, Somalia - the Bush administration opted for a new counterinsurgency strategy. Violence was reduced because, for the first time since the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Iraqis felt that there was a force capable of dominating the situation and ensuring basic order. "

" Like many great world faiths, Mormonism has an important strand of sacred mystery. Mormon temples have traditionally been closed to outsiders and designed with opaque windows. "

" Our post-denominational age should be the perfect time for a Mormon to become president, or at least the Republican nominee. Mormons share nearly all the conservative commitments so beloved of the evangelicals who wield disproportionate influence in primary elections. "

" The world is littered with constitutions that have written guarantees of rights but that don't actually deliver rights. What differentiates the ones where rights are real from where rights are fake is that it's in the initial interests of the majority to actually deliver these rights. "

" The rise of the presidency began with the Louisiana Purchase, which in 1803 doubled the land mass of the United States. History taught the framers that, just as Rome changed from republic to empire with conquest of new lands, territorial acquisition would lead to the centralization of political power. "

" In politics, Joseph Smith was something of a radical. He preached, instead of democracy, a version of theocratic rule within a framework given by his own prophetic leadership. At Nauvoo, Smith affected a Napoleonic uniform and made himself into a general and quasi king of the polity he had constituted. "

" How can you have the religion of the sovereign be the religion of the state if the sovereign belongs to many religions? And it's at that point, I think, historically, that you start to see people saying maybe the state should not associate itself with any religion. Maybe there shouldn't be any official religion. "

" The Mormons' passage from bugbears of the Republican Party to its stalwarts may be analogized to a similar move among middle-class white Southerners, to whom the Republican Party was anathema until the 1970s and '80s, after which it became almost the sole representative. "

" In 1953, after the armistice ending the Korean War, South Korea lay in ruins. President Eisenhower was eager to put an end to hostilities that had left his predecessor deeply unpopular, and the war ended in an uneasy stalemate. "

" Cyber war takes place largely in secret, unknown to the general public on both sides. "

" From a constitutional standpoint, the religion of a candidate is supposed to make no difference. Even before the founding fathers dreamed up the First Amendment, they inserted a provision in the Constitution expressly prohibiting any religious test for office. "

Noah Feldman

Office

Constitution

" Since the birth of modern Orthodox Judaism in 19th-century Germany, a central goal of the movement has been to normalize the observance of traditional Jewish law - to make it possible to follow all 613 biblical commandments assiduously while still participating in the reality of the modern world. "

" William O. Douglas married not one, not two, not three, but four hot blondes. He was not faithful to any of them, not even the last, and each was younger than the previous woman... But after his personal life began to actually fall apart, he developed a set of values about the Constitution that turned out to maximize our autonomy and freedom. "

" Well-meaning Europeans sometimes argue that unlike the U.S., their countries are traditionally 'homogeneous' and have little experience with immigration. "

" It is often noted that it can be hard for democracies to fight wars because of changing public opinion. "

" The yeshiva where I studied considers itself modern Orthodox, not ultra-Orthodox. We followed a rigorous secular curriculum alongside traditional Talmud and Bible study. "

" The Chinese public is deeply nationalist, which matters to China's unelected political leadership as much as U.S. nationalism does to American politicians. As China becomes the world's largest economy, there is meaningful public pressure for its power status to advance in parallel. Any alternative would be humiliating. "

" In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the major international question was the relation between Islam and democracy. "

" During the New Deal, people thought to be liberal was to reject socialism on one extreme and fascism on the other, and to preserve capitalism through regulation and a social safety net. "

" The world is full of nations that are part of the community of nations that don't respect rights. "

" The core idea that underlies all of our democratic states, the core political idea, is this idea that it's not that one person is the sovereign; it's that all of the people are sovereign. "

" The transformation of the United States from a traditional republic to a democratic nation run in large measure by a single executive took a couple of hundred years. "