Liberty Matters

The OLL brings people together to debate and discuss important texts and big ideas about liberty.

Judge Glock, “Albert Venn Dicey and the Immunity of the Administrative State” (December 2020)

By: Judge Glock

Welcome to our December 2020 edition of Liberty Matters. In this month’s forum Judge Glock has written our lead essay on the A.V. Dicey. Dicey was an English legal scholar at Oxford in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who is…

Mikko Tolonen, Mandeville, Hayek, and the Politics of Self-Esteem (October 2020)

By: Mikko Tolonen

Welcome to our October 2020 edition of Liberty Matters. In this essay and discussion forum Mikko Tolonen, Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Helsinki, discusses the work of Bernard Mandeville, one of the…

Ruth Scurr, “J.S. Mill & Life Writing” (August 2020)

By: Ruth Scurr

Welcome to our August 2020 edition of Liberty Matters. In this essay and discussion forum Ruth Scurr, a fellow and director of Studies in Human, Social and Political Sciences at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge discusses John…

Sarah Morgan Smith, “To Covenant and Combine Ourselves into a Civil Body Politic”: The Mayflower Compact @ 400 Years (May 2020)

By: Sarah Morgan Smith

In this edition of Liberty Matters, Sarah Morgan Smith, an Ashbrook Center Fellow, General Editor of Ashbrook’s Core Documents Collections, and co-director of the Center’s Religion in American History and Politics project, helps the…

Daniel B. Klein, “Smith, Hume, and Burke as Policy Liberals and Polity Conservatives” (March 2020)

By: Daniel B. Klein

In this edition of Liberty Matters, Daniel Klein, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, sketches the liberalism of Smith, Hume, and Burke, and argues that it was a worldly liberalism, sensitive to the coarse clay of…

Adam J. Macleod, “Bagehot and the Causes of Our Crises” (January 2020)

By: Adam J. MacLeod

In this edition of Liberty Matters, Adam MacLeod, Professor of Law at Faulkner University, Jones School of Law, considers the English constitution of Walter Bagehot. Bagehot’s constitutionalism is not just a theory of institutions.…