By coincidence, the name of William
Winslow Crosskey came up a number of times this week in discussions at
CESJ. Crosskey, who taught
constitutional law at the University of Chicago law school, was probably the
premier constitutional scholar of the twentieth century. Paradoxically, hardly anyone remembers him
today. Perhaps this is because his book,
the two-volume (with a posthumous third) Politics
and the Constitution in the History of the United States (1953) is not
exactly “lite” reading, or it could be that, in common with Mortimer Adler,
people are not drawn to thinkers who make them think. There are, however, signs that things might
be changing:
• Mark Your Calendar:
Gather with students, grassroots leaders and
concerned citizens on Friday, April 22, 2016 in
Washington, DC, for the 12th annual demonstration at the Federal Reserve in
Washington, D.C. Co-hosted by the Coalition for Capital
Homesteading and the Center for Economic and Social
Justice, the rally will run from 11:00 AM to 1:30 PM,
starting on the mall side across the street from the Constitution
Ave. entrance of the Federal Reserve Building (between 20th and
21st Streets, NW).
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| A few cents can make a difference. |
• Amazon Smile
program. To participate in the
Amazon Smile program for CESJ, go to https://smile.amazon.com/. Next, sign in to your account. (If you don’t have an account with Amazon,
you can create one by clicking on the tiny little link below the “Sign in using
our secure server” button.) Once you
have signed into your account, you need to select CESJ as your charity — and
you have to be careful to do it exactly this way: in the
space provided for “Or select your own charitable organization” type “Center for Economic and Social Justice
Arlington.” If you type anything
else, you will either get no results or more than you want to sift
through. Once you’ve typed (or copied and
pasted) “Center for Economic and Social
Justice Arlington” into the space provided, hit “Select” — and you will be
taken to the Amazon shopping site, all ready to go.
• Individual prepublication copies of Easter
Witness: From Broken Dream To A New Vision For Ireland (official
publication/release date is April 24, 2016) are now available on Amazon, and should
soon be up on Barnes and Noble. Bulk
orders for the first printing can also be placed now; we’re accepting them on a
case-by-case basis . . . meaning until the official release date you can only
purchase books by the case and not sell or otherwise distribute them until noon
on April 24, 2016. There are 26 to a
case, and non-institutional/non-vendor purchasers get a 20% discount off the
$20 cover price on wholesale lots ($416/case).
Shipping is extra. Send enquiries
to publications@cesj.org. An additional discount may be available for
institutions such as schools, clubs, and other organizations as well as
retailers.
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| Hamilton: Crosskey's guy. |
• Dr. Norman Kurland had an important hour-long conversation
with the dean of one of the world’s leading law schools this week. It turns out that the dean is a strong
advocate of the revival of the work of William Winslow Crosskey (1894-1968),
who (not Scalia) seems to be the “patron saint” of “originalism” according to some commentators. As one authority noted, “I count Crosskey as one of the greatest legal scholars of
the last fifty years. Around 1953, I met John W. Davis, for whom Crosskey had
clerked on Wall Street when he was a young man. Davis told me – and I agree
with him – that Crosskey’s brain was the best piece of legal equipment he had
ever encountered. Years later, in reflecting on Crosskey’s life and work, I
came to the realization that I admired him not only for the remarkable books he
had written, but particularly because of his moral courage. He persisted in his
work, notwithstanding a torrent of criticism, because he believed he was right.
Crosskey was a great man.” Not by
coincidence, Crosskey’s view of constitutional law was integrated into Easter Witness, although he is cited
only in the bibliography (we cut out a lot of text).
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 49 different countries and 52 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from
the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and India. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were “Thomas Hobbes on
Private Property,” “Aristotle on Private Property,” “A Field Guide for Heroes,”
“Are Rights for Everyone?” and “The Crisis That Need Not Be, I: A System
Designed to Fail.”
Those are the happenings for this week, at least those that
we know about. If you have an
accomplishment that you think should be listed, send us a note about it at
mgreaney [at] cesj [dot] org, and we’ll see that it gets into the next “issue.” If you have a short (250-400 word) comment on
a specific posting, please enter your comments in the blog — do not send them
to us to post for you. All comments are
moderated, so we’ll see it before it goes up.
#30#