Articles By: Richard Albert

Richard Albert, a graduate of Yale, Oxford, and Harvard, is an Assistant Professor at Boston College Law School, where he specializes in constitutional law and democratic theory. He writes about constitutional politics, the separation of powers, the role of courts in liberal democracy, and religion in public life.

America’s forgotten founders

No one can deny the starring role that James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and other leading lights played in America’s constitutional founding. They launched history’s greatest project in democracy and will forever be remembered for setting alight the path to liberty. So...

August 24th, 2010 | Featured, US | Read More

Is America a Christian nation?

Speaking from the heart of the Muslim world in Turkey’s Cankaya Palace in April 2009, President Barack Obama answered the question with the nuance that has come to characterize his public statements: America, he declared, is “a predominantly Christian nation” but “we do not consider ourselves...

July 31st, 2010 | Featured, Politics | Read More

Why the tea party is good for America

Late last year, few could have predicted that Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown would return Massachusetts to the red column after decades awash in blue. Even fewer could have foreseen primary victories for Sharron Angle in Nevada, Rand Paul in Kentucky, Raul Labrador in Idaho, Mo Brooks in Alabama,...

June 23rd, 2010 | Featured, Politics, US | Read More

President Palin?

When Republican presidential nominee John McCain announced his vice presidential running mate in the summer of 2008, his choice was greeted with equal servings of curiosity and enthusiasm. Movement conservatives saw the selection as a game-changer: the little-known vice presidential nominee brought youth,...

May 28th, 2010 | Politics, US | Read More

Our conscience-in-chief

Even before he became President of the United States, Barack Obama was at the center of national conversations on the most contentious moral issues of the day. As a lawyer, teacher, advocate and politician, Obama brought depth and nuance to his personal and public discussions regarding religion, race,...

April 27th, 2010 | Featured | Read More

The next justice

President Barack Obama’s next nomination to the Supreme Court, his second in as many years, may come as early as this spring, followed shortly by Senate confirmation hearings in the summer. For liberal activists, the timing is perfect. For the President, however, the prospect of a mid-summer battle...

March 25th, 2010 | Featured, Politics, US | Read More

The rhetoric of redemption in presidential elections

In the eight presidential elections over the course of the past thirty years, the presidential challenger has defeated the incumbent party candidate on only four occasions—in 1980, 1992, 2000, and 2008. The formula for victory was no secret then, nor is it now. The challenger triumphed by successfully...

February 22nd, 2010 | Politics, US | Read More

Presidential roulette

Imagine the unthinkable happens: later this evening, just as the President approaches the podium to deliver his annual State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress, terrorists unleash the horror of a weapon of mass destruction in the heart of Washington. As first responders comb through...

January 27th, 2010 | Featured, State of the Union | Read More

The price of freedom

The latest tragedy to befall Haiti was not an act of God. It was a failure of humanity. The death and disaster in Haiti are the direct result of the world’s failure to repay its greatest debt to a heroic nation whose citizens stood up for freedom at a time when others wilted in the face of tyranny. It...

January 22nd, 2010 | Featured, Haiti | Read More

Telling the story of history

Years from now, when history strokes its pen to tell the story of the 2008 presidential election, how will it capture in words a moment whose full meaning can be conveyed only with emotion? How will historians, whose scholarly norms demand dispassion, give voice to feeling? How will they paint the...

December 11th, 2009 | Talk About Race | Read More