Stephen L. Carter

I’ve never been a fan of litigating election results in court, and the lawsuit filed last month by the loser of the Democratic primary for a Florida seat in the US House of Representatives seems as frivolous as they come. Yet one of its several charges deserves more thought. Not because it’s true —…

The exoneration of two men wrongly convicted of helping to murder Malcolm X is good news for the cause of justice. But it raises the question of why, until Netflix aired the series “Who Killed Malcolm X?” earlier this year, hardly anybody but a handful of scholars and biographers paid attention to…

Suppose you hire a plumber to fix a leak. While the plumber works, you’re busy on your laptop. An hour later, he tells you he’s done and hands you a bill. In theory, you could decline to pay until you’ve crawled beneath the sink to check the newly welded joint for signs of moisture. But a…

I’m a strong supporter of getting a vaccination for Covid-19. (I’ve had two plus my booster.) And I agree that getting shots into the arms of most of the 70 to 75 million US adults who remain unvaccinated is a matter of public urgency. But the libertarian in me believes that means are as important…

Those of us who’ve dreamed of extraterrestrial life since sci-fi-drenched childhoods are awaiting the federal government’s forthcoming report on UFOs. And yet the report is unlikely to change any minds. Which makes the controversy over unidentified flying objects a lot like everything else these…

Ever since President Joe Biden ordered US intelligence agencies to investigate reports that the Covid-19 virus might have escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, commentators have argued over what difference it makes if the theory turns out to be right. Here’s why the answer matters: The discovery…

The news that some employers have started handing out cash rewards to workers who are vaccinated against Covid-19 warms my libertarian heart. Yes, the idea is controversial; yes, there are legal implications. But providing incentives to get people to do what others think they should is almost…

The World Health Agency has stepped into the controversy over vaccine passports, announcing its opposition. Not enough is known about whether the vaccines prevent transmission, says the WHO. And vaccine passports wouldn’t be fair to poorer countries where vaccination has been slow. They might…

As calls mount for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to resign, the law professor in me wonders impishly why he’s still in office. After all, as critics have pointed out, were Cuomo a CEO, he’d likely be on his way out. But he’s not a CEO; he’s an elected official; and he has no written contract with…

let me take a moment to explain why the wordsmith in me is troubled by the way that we’ve settled on the term “insurrection” to describe what happened at the US Capitol on January 6. Or perhaps not the wordsmith: the unrepentant 1970s radical who still lives uneasily within my libertarian soul. …