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Remember FreedomThe American Liberty Project

Week by Week

This Week, and Every Week Before

Each week brings a Sunday essay, a Thursday Freedom Note on the same subject and, where one exists, a short video. Newest first.

  1. Week 7 · This week

    The Rights Not Written Down

    The Ninth and Tenth Amendments are the two shortest in the Bill of Rights and the two most often waved at each other across a political argument. Read carefully, they are a pair of instructions about who holds what was never handed over.

  2. Week 6

    Twelve Citizens and the Limits of Penalty

    The Seventh Amendment keeps ordinary people inside the civil courtroom. The Eighth sets a ceiling on what the state may do once it has won. Together they answer a question the rest of the Bill of Rights leaves open: what happens after judgment.

  3. Week 5

    The Machinery of a Fair Accusation

    The Fifth and Sixth Amendments do not promise that the innocent go free. They promise that the state must move through a known, public, reviewable procedure before it takes anyone's liberty.

  4. Week 4

    Papers, Effects, and Modern Data

    The Fourth Amendment was written against general warrants that let officers search anywhere for anything. The question of our decade is what that rule means when the papers are held by a company.

  5. Week 3

    Arms, Militias, and the Fear of Standing Power

    The Second and Third Amendments were written by people who had watched an army live in their houses. Read together, they are less about weapons than about who holds organized force in a free state.

  6. Week 2

    Forty-Five Words, Six Freedoms

    The First Amendment is one sentence long and does six separate jobs. Reading it as a single vague guarantee of self-expression is the most common way Americans lose track of what it actually protects.

  7. Week 1

    Why Remember Freedom?

    Rights do not enforce themselves. They are kept alive by citizens who know what they say, where they came from, and how they are lawfully used.