Nicholas Stephanopoulos
Nicholas Stephanopoulos
Recent Stories
For progressive lawyers, time for a new message
Two weeks ago, many of the finest legal thinkers in the country gathered at Yale Law School to discuss the Constitution in 2020. Their task, as conference participant David Boies put it, was to come up with a compelling progressive vision of the...
The route to a progressive Constitution, with a stop in the Elm City
During the final year of the Reagan Administration, the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Policy published two remarkable documents. One, titled "The Constitution in the Year 2000," described important Supreme Court decisions in 15 constitutional...
Dems' bind: give Bush credit on Middle East?
For many people who opposed President Bush's re-election, myself included, foreign policy was the single most important reason for our opposition. We believed that Bush had led the nation to war on false pretenses, by fabricating (or at least greatly...
Do today's Ivies live up to their reputations?
My friend Ross Douthat has a column in the current Atlantic Monthly about his experience as an undergraduate at Harvard. According to Douthat, college life at Harvard and other elite universities is marked by two features. The first is the ascendance...
On foreign policy may, take a left to go right
What will world politics look like over the next few decades? Will the United States be able to retain the dominant geopolitical position that it currently enjoys? The National Intelligence Council, a CIA-affiliated research group, recently published a...
By way of the Supreme Court, a death sentence for fair sentencing
Imagine that Johnny, hard up on cash, decides to rob a bank along with a few buddies. While his associates watch the doors and man the getaway car, Johnny marches to the teller and demands all of the bank's money. Terrified, the teller opens the vault...
Post-election, time to rethink redistricting
America's electoral system has many features that its backers would call quirks, but that its critics would describe as grave flaws. The Electoral College focuses presidential candidates' money and attention on a handful of contested "swing states.
Getting the real America to the voting booth
Once it became clear that President Bush had been re-elected, the soul-searching and backbiting began almost immediately within the Democratic Party. Some characterized the party's message as more of an attack on the president than a compelling vision...
Exorcism in the Bay State, on field and off
Growing up in Boston, I learned at an early age the iron laws of Massachusetts baseball and politics. The Red Sox never win the World Series, and Massachusetts politicians are always thwarted when they run for president. The baseball lesson, the...
How candidates play the game says more than any stump speech
here are many ways to run a campaign and many ways for a candidate to convince people to vote for him. First, a candidate can defend his record and outline the policies he would advocate if elected. Bill Clinton's 1992 manifesto, "Putting People...