Free Republic

Trevor Burrus is a research fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies. ... Marriage is a constantly changing social institution that adapts to social and economic conditions. And when those conditions change, marriage changes. Our modern view of marriage — one that has generally predominated in Western societies over the past 200 years — is the outlier. Historically, marriage has been about finding good in-laws and securing economic advantage. And marrying for love is a thoroughly modern invention ...

Last week, former Justice John Paul Stevens penned an op-ed for the Washington Post on “The Five Words that Can Fix the Second Amendment.” The piece is actually an excerpt from his new book Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution. In the book, Stevens suggests some changes that would ratify his view of cases in which he stridently dissented, such as Citizens United and Heller. Stevens’s dissent in Heller, the case in which a 5-4 Court held that the Second Amendment conveys an individual right to own guns even for those not part of a militia,...