John Adams

The ideas that formed the Constitution, the pioneers: Socrates, Xenophon, Plato

by Rob Natelson | Dec 13, 2022 | Founding Principles, John Adams

This is the fourth in a series of essays on the ideas behind the Constitution. You can find the first two essays here, here, and here As explained in the second installment, 18th-century schoolboys were not expected to be as proficient in Greek as in Latin. However,...

Oppose a Disease at its Beginning

by Mike Maharrey | Nov 27, 2019 | John Adams, John Dickinson

If you give politicians an inch, they’ll take a mile. The Founders and Old Revolutionaries warned us about this over and over. Take John Dickinson, for example. Known as “the Penman of the Revolution,” he was one of the leading writers in the early...

Obsta principiis: Nip the Shoots of Arbitrary Power in the Bud

by Mike Maharrey | Sep 27, 2018 | Constitution, Founding Principles, John Adams

John Adams warned us. When you spot even the slightest violation of the Constitution, it’s imperative that you nip it in the bud. In 1774 and 1775, Daniel Leonard wrote a series of essays under the penname Massachusettensis asserting Parliaments unlimited authority...

The Constitutional Right to Trial by Jury

by Tenth Amendment | Mar 12, 2016 | John Adams, Theophilus Parsons, Thomas Jefferson, Trial by Jury

NOTE: The following is an excerpt of the article, The Rise and Fall of Jury Nullification, by James Ostrowski. Originally published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, Volume 15, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 89–115, the full article can be found at Mises.org What the...

The 10th Amendment

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

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