U.S. Hegemony
From Independence to Hegemony: Early U.S. Foreign Policy
This paper uses neoclassical realism to explain how early U.S. foreign policy and economic choices—from the Articles of Confederation and the Treaty of Alliance with France through the creation of a national navy and the Monroe Doctrine—laid the groundwork for America’s eventual rise as a hegemonic power. It argues that leaders’ perceptions (especially Adams and Hamilton), domestic state-building, and naval expansion jointly shaped a strategic path from political and economic weakness to regional dominance, and then critiques neoclassical realism’s limits by highlighting how slavery and socially constructed norms complicate any “real world” theory of international relations.
It’s Good to be the Hegemon: The Benefits of a Stable International Order. This essay combines neoclassical realism and hegemonic stability theory to argue that when global economic interdependence is high, one state naturally emerges as hegemon—securing trade routes, providing a reserve currency, and leveraging information and soft power in ways that benefit both itself and the wider system. Using historical cases of Macedonian, Roman, and British dominance, it then analyzes the United States as the contemporary hegemon, emphasizing both the material advantages (military reach, dollar centrality, networked information power) and the legal–ethical obligations—especially enforcing anti-slavery norms in global supply chains—required to sustain a stable and legitimate international order
Law and Lawyers
This paper argues that integrating literary works into legal education deepens understanding of law as a human, morally fraught enterprise rather than a neutral set of technical rules. Using texts such as E.M. Forster’s Howards End, The Trial of Mrs. Packard, The Crucible, and short stories by George Orwell and Sherman Alexie, the paper shows how literature illuminates the lived consequences of doctrines like coverture, the religious roots of women’s subordination, and the vulnerability of due process to political fear and expediency.
The essay defends a classical liberal, Natural Law–based view of American constitutionalism against collectivist traditions that subordinate individual rights to state power or group interests. It examines historical episodes such as McCarthyism, COINTELPRO, and post‑9/11 counterterrorism to argue that appeals to security and “ticking time bomb” scenarios erode due process and equality before the law. Finally, the paper contrasts “mechanic” lawyers who merely service existing power structures with “architect” lawyers who resist political pressure, reject narcissistic identity performances, and use law to protect individual dignity, a distinction dramatized through Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” and Alexie’s “The Toughest Indian in the World.
Power: Lincoln and the People
This paper argues that political power is not a thing possessed by rulers but a dynamic emerging from socially accepted “truths,” and uses Abraham Lincoln’s presidency to test Michel Foucault’s schema across religious, secular, and democratic contexts. It traces how authority grounded first in divine sanction (Saul, David, Cyrus), then in secular statecraft (Machiavelli’s prince), shifts in the American case toward a democratic discourse of natural rights and equality that both constrains and enables leadership.
By examining Lincoln’s legal and rhetorical attack on slavery, his controversial war measures, and his use of new technologies, the paper contends that Lincoln became a leader rather than a tyrant because he aligned himself with institutions and movements already articulating an egalitarian truth-discourse, culminating in the Civil War, emancipation, and the Reconstruction amendments. Ultimately, it proposes a general criterion: whether a ruler is a leader or a tyrant depends on whether the prevailing “agreed upon truths” and the institutions they sustain extend equal rights to all or uphold fundamentally immoral hierarchies such as chattel slavery.
Democracy is Not a Philosophy
Democracy is Not a Philosophy argues that democracy should be defined in strictly procedural and institutional terms, not in terms of moral or ethical ideals such as equality, liberty, or democratizing “moments.” The essay first shows how classical and contemporary theorists load democracy with contested normative content, producing endlessly malleable subtypes, claims of democratization, and diagnoses of democratic backsliding. It then proposes a minimalist definition of democracy—free and fair elections, competitive offices, separation of powers, institutional capacity to govern, and effective due process—deliberately separating this definition from natural rights and other liberal principles. On this basis, it treats moral and ethical standards as the domain of natural law and classical liberalism (especially Locke), and uses American constitutional jurisprudence to show how the same democracy can oscillate between Hobbesian “might makes right” moments (e.g., slavery, segregation, coercive labor law) and more Lockean moments that affirm natural rights (e.g., Brown, Loving, privacy and family-rights cases). The essay concludes that democracy itself has no inherent moral content; instead, the freedom of a democracy must be evaluated over time by examining whether its legal order protects or infringes the natural rights that supervene upon, and stand in judgment over, municipal law.