Essays


  • What Shakespeare Can Teach Us About Campaign 2024
    Michael A. Genovese holds the Loyola Chair of Leadership and serves as President of the Global Policy Institute at Loyola Marymount University. The author of over 50 books, he frequently appears as a political commentator on CNN and elsewhere. No …
  • Review of Stephen Knott’s Coming to Terms with John F. Kennedy
    Alec D. Rogers is an attorney specializing in government practice and policy in Washington, DC.  In Coming to Terms with John F. Kennedy, Stephen Knott brings a lifetime of careful and thoughtful study of the American government, foreign policy, and …
  • Bowling in Fear? Gun Violence and the Erosion of Civil Society
    Brianne Wolf is Assistant Professor of Political Theory at James Madison College at Michigan State University. The issue of guns in America is often discussed as essential to freedom in a liberal society. On the one side of the issue, …
  • Stewarding a Shapeless Culture
    Mark Antonio Menaldo is Department Head and Associate Professor of Liberal Studies at Texas A&M University-Commerce. From heady academic categories to buzzword nomenclatures, “culture” applies to almost anything. The dominant way of thinking of  “culture” today is as a “social …
  • The Lincoln Challenge
    Steven B. Smith, Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science, Yale University Every other year I teach a class at Yale called The Mind of Lincoln.  The course is an in-depth study of the speeches and letters of Lincoln combined with …
  • The Return of the “Military-Industrial Complex”
    David Lewis Schaefer, Professor of Political Science, College of the Holy Cross In what was probably the most foolish utterance he made as President, Dwight Eisenhower, in his final address to the nation before he left office, offered a warning, …
  • Pence: Do the Right Thing
    Gary Schmitt is a senior fellow in the Social, Cultural and Constitutional Studies Program at the American Enterprise Institute. When former Vice President Mike Pence talks about his preferred nominees for the federal bench and the Supreme Court, he will …

About The Constitutionalist

The Constitutionalist is dedicated to the intellectual and political work of constitutional democracy. Our authors are open to a range of political perspectives, but we are unified by a capacious understanding of the constitutional endeavor–namely, we believe that constitutions are sustained not only by law, but also by civil society and civic norms. Using our expertise in political philosophy, American political development, public law, and political culture and literature, we aim to foster conversation across disciplinary lines and beyond the confines of academia. We believe this kind of conversation is vital to the creation and maintenance of good constitutions. Though we are interested in what happens elsewhere, our primary focus is on the American experience.

The views expressed by our contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Jack Miller Center, whose funding supports this endeavor. The Jack Miller Center is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to reinvigorating education in America’s founding principles and history, an education vital to thoughtful and engaged citizenship. They support professors and educators who share our mission, offering programs, resources, fellowships, and more to help them teach our nation’s students—from high school through college.