In Dissent

The government has frequently fallen short of the declaration that “all men are created equal,” and in more ways than one. In our season finale, columnist, author, and Harvard Professor Noah Feldman and Independence Institute Senior Fellow Phillip Magness discusses one of the grossest miscarriages of justice of all time: Buck v. Bell.

Who’s afraid of trial by jury? A lot of people, and even some Supreme Court justices. In this episode, PLF’s Steve Simpson and Cato Institute’s Tommy Berry discuss exactly why the Founders cared about the right to a jury trial and the ways the government tries to keep us from getting one. And we tell the harrowing story of Jarkesy v. SEC—a case that recently reaffirmed that, as John Adams said, representative government and trial by jury are the “heart and lungs of liberty.”

The Declaration says that the government enjoys only those “just powers” delegated to them by the people. Through the Constitution, the American people gave certain limited powers to the national government and reserved the rest to the states or the people. Yet Congress, with the Supreme Court’s help, has dramatically expanded its power to regulate Americans’ lives through a broad interpretation of the Commerce Clause. In this episode, Vice President for Legal Strategy at Stand Together Casey Mattox and Georgetown Law Professor Randy Barnett tell us about Wickard v. Filburn and Gonzales v. Raich, which transformed the Commerce Clause into a national problem-solving clause.

Governments derive powers from “the consent of the governed.” Don’t they? In one of the earliest constitutional cases, the Supreme Court seemed to say so. But the Eleventh Amendment threw a wrench in it all, making it exceptionally difficult for us to hold the government accountable in the courts when it violates our rights. In Episode 3, Georgetown Law Professor Randy Barnett, NYT columnist and author Jesse Wegman, and Cato Institute Senior Vice President for Legal Studies Clark Neily discuss Chisholm v. Georgia.

To the Framers, happiness didn’t just mean fun. It meant the pursuit of a good life through hard work, discipline, and constant self-assessment. In Episode 2, National Constitution Center CEO Emeritus Jeffrey Rosen, attorney and author Timothy Sandefur, and Supreme Court advocate Alan Gura tell us what the “pursuit of happiness” meant, how that promise has been enshrined in the Constitution, and how the Supreme Court has all but gutted it in one of the most despised decisions of all time: The Slaughterhouse Cases.

A man rushing on horseback in the dead of night to break a deadlocked vote. A printer faced with the terrifying ramifications of printing an incendiary document. And beleaguered troops—underfed, underpaid, and on the verge of defeat.

In hindsight, the American Independence seems inevitable. But at the time, it was anything but. In the opening episode, Pulitzer Prize winner Joseph Ellis, historian and biographer Richard Brookhiser, and Professor of American History Dermot Trainor describe the origins of the first great American dissent: The Declaration of Independence.

In Dissent traces the founding ideals of the Declaration of Independence from the revolutionary moment of their birth to the courtrooms where they’ve been tested, twisted, and sometimes abandoned. Each episode pairs vivid historical storytelling—a man riding through the night to break a deadlocked vote, a printer setting type for a document that could get him hanged—with landmark Supreme Court cases that reveal the distance between America’s founding promise and its legal reality.