Things to Read This Week (12/29)

A note on the Heritage Guide to the Constitution

I haven’t been reading much the past week but:

The Right to Exit Religion, by Zalman Rothschild. An interesting discussion of the legacy of Wisconsin v. Yoder, with implications for Hasidic education, just published.

Also, my entry on the original understanding of the Takings Clause, co-authored with my fantastic former student and research assistant Sarah Leitner, has now come out in the Heritage Guide to the Constitution, 3rd edition — the whole of which is now online.

An awkward note: I am proud of this piece but I have felt somewhat reluctant to link to or promote it, because of the ongoing moral and institutional collapse of the Heritage Foundation (cf). Indeed, Josh Blackman and John Malcolm, who organized the guide, have themselves just left Heritage, along with many others. So although it may be obvious, I’ll state explicitly that these essays were drafted and contributed some time ago, and given the nature of our author agreements there isn’t a way for us to “leave” Heritage if we wished to. But despite the Heritage branding, I do think the guide is a very valuable resource about the Constitution.

I thought about trying to organize a group letter to this effect, but again perhaps all of this is so obvious that there is no point. In any event, these are just my thoughts.