The Conscience of the Constitution

Free Thoughts
E18 -

Timothy Sandefur joins us to talk about the U.S. Constitution. Which is the Constitution’s primary value: preserving liberty or promoting democracy?

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Hosts
Trevor Burrus
Research Fellow, Constitutional Studies
Aaron Ross Powell
Director and Editor
Guests
Timothy Sandefur

Timothy Sandefur is vice president for legal affairs at the Goldwater Institute, where he holds the Clarence J. and Katherine P. Duncan Chair in Constitutional Government. He has litigated important cases involving economic liberty, private property, and other individual rights in courts nationwide. He is also the author of several books, including Freedom’s Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness (2023), Frederick Douglass: Self-​Made Man (2018), and Cornerstone of Liberty: Property Rights in 21st- Century America (second edition, coauthored with Christina Sandefur), as well as scores of scholarly articles on a wide range of subjects.

He has written for Reason, National Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, and The Objective Standard, where he is a contributing editor. He has taught at Pepperdine University, University of the Pacific’s McGeorge School of Law, George Mason University, and Arizona State University, where he held the 2023–2024 Barry Goldwater Chair in American Institutions.

Jason Kuznicki

Jason Kuznicki was a senior fellow and the editor of Cato Books and of Cato Unbound, the Cato Institute’s online journal of debate. His first book, Technology and the End of Authority: What Is Government For? (Palgrave, 2017) surveys western political theory from a libertarian perspective. Kuznicki was an assistant editor of the Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. He also contributed a chapter to libertarianism.org’s Visions of Liberty. He earned a PhD in history from Johns Hopkins University in 2005, where his work was offered both a Fulbright Fellowship and a Chateaubriand Prize.

Timothy Sandefur joins Trevor Burrus and Jason Kuznicki for a conversation about America’s founding documents: the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence.

Which is the Constitution’s primary value: liberty or democracy? Is it enough to tell lawmakers to just “go back to the Constitution” when Constitutional interpretation varies so wildly? What does the Constitution have to say about slavery? Individual rights? Voting rights?

Sandefur is a principal attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation and the author of the 2014 book The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty. He also heads the Pacific Legal Foundation’s Economic Liberty Project, which protects entrepreneurs against intrusive government regulation.

Show Notes and Further Reading:

Supreme Court Cases

John Locke, Second Treatise of Government

William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England

Akil Amar, America’s Unwritten Constitution

J. Harvey Wilkinson, Cosmic Constitutional Theory: Why Americans Are Losing Their Inalienable Right to Self-​Governance