Like many holidays, talk of July Fourth immediately summons to mind the ways in which you’ll celebrate. Barbecues. Potlucks. Fireworks displays. Parades. All delightful celebrations. I’d like to add another to the list: naturalization ceremonies. Society has been missing out by omitting these from the classic Independence Day festivities. The events—during which immigrants are sworn […]
Friday is the Fourth of July. What will you celebrate? Freedom from the English monarchy? To me, the Fourth is about freedom, period. When the Founders signed the Declaration of Independence, they put forth a radical idea: Rights don’t come from kings or presidents. They come from being human. Government’s job is to protect those […]
Christianity Today reports that the Trump Administration is targeting Iranian Christian migrants for deportation: On June 19, as Iran and Israel exchanged volleys of missiles and officials secretly finalized plans to dispatch American bombers to strike Iranian nuclear sites, pastor Ara Torosian published a letter to his church. Torosian, an Iranian pastor at Cornerstone West […]
The New Orleans City Council is considering an ordinance that would allow the city’s police department, in the name of fighting crime, to use real-time facial recognition technology to find and track people as they move about the city. As The Washington Post reported last month, New Orleans police had already been secretly receiving real-time […]
It took a while. But the most recent federal holiday to be added to the calendar, it turns out, is the most American holiday yet. That holiday, Juneteenth, is today. It celebrates the abolition of chattel slavery in the U.S., marked by June 19, 1865—the day Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger informed slaves in Galveston, Texas, […]
(NA) Today, is Juneteenth, the federal holiday commemorating the abolition of slavery – the greatest triumph of freedom in American history. In this post, I compile some links to my writings relevant to the holiday and its significance. All are posts published here on the Volokh Conspiracy blog. “Juneteenth and the Universalist Principles of the […]