Faculty Research & Public Works

I argue Tocqueville revived modern political reflection on poetry and the importance of poetry for politics.

As human beings, we can live free and fulfilling lives neither as isolated individuals nor simply as members of humanity. Rather, we require a properly constituted particular political community in which we can make manifest our universal humanity.

This is a short essay at Law and Liberty, one of the leading blogs for conservative or libertarian scholarship, arguing that originalists have always been committed to an aggressive enforcement of federalism, rather than a recent and bad-faith turn once they gained control of the Supreme Court

Assembled and edited various editions of the Arizona Constitution for public use, including the 1910/1912 Arizona Constitution; a scholarly edition with all amendments in the state’s history, and both abridged and unabridged versions.

Edited the Arizona Constitution to create an approachable one-third length version and co-authored and introductory prefatory essay on federalism to help explain the basics of how the federal and state constitutions work together, for distribution to schools, civic groups, etc.

This was a short essay on Arizona's Constitution, as part of a series on federalism and state/local governments, aimed at creating civics materials for a general audience (especially students.) Other contributors included not only prominent legal scholars but current and former state attorneys

Quoted as the lede for my discussion of how the importance of fidelity to the Constitution and how politicians were once willing to give up careers out of fidelity to it, rather than simply ignoring politically inconvenient parts [though they often demanded amendments to fix its flaws.

Argues that prohibition teaches us important lessons today, both in the context of marijuana and politics more broadly: that it's something progressives should care about, that the federal government cannot force the states to execute federal law but that states cannot proactively obstruct fed

Looks to 1920s history to show federalism is not a historically conservative doctrine but once progressives embraced and should consider again, especially in a polarized America.