In Henry VIII, Shakespeare looks beyond religious conflict to express a larger moral—and Christian—vision. He offers a panorama of Christian virtues and characters who manifest them, indicating by their actions and sufferings the role their virtues might play in supporting nobility and justice. He also finds support in Christianity for deriving noble and base from the character of one's soul rather than from birth and for a reliance on fair judicial procedure rather than on the sword for the protection of justice. Finally, in the relation between Henry VIII and Archbishop Cranmer, Shakespeare illustrates a politics that protects religious belief from persecution. Henry VIII offers a vision of the virtues of Christianity that could contribute to a good political community, or at least to understanding what such a community entails.

Hugo Grotius is often seen as reducing justice to the systematic protection of individual rights. However, this reading struggles to account for the surprisingly robust place he accords to punishment. An offender cannot plausibly claim punishment as a right, and the right to punish gives little direction about how best to carry out punishment. These difficulties point toward Grotius's little-noticed bifurcation of justice into “expletive” and “attributive” categories. While expletive (or “strict”) justice provides a grounding for the right to punish, its subsequent exercise must be governed by attributive justice. This higher justice considers persons and situations; requires imagination and prudential judgment; looks to the future; aims for the common good; acknowledges the importance of virtue; and never claims perfect solutions. Thus, Grotius's supposedly modern understanding of natural rights is best understood within an account of his specifically political thought—one that acknowledges an overarching framework of classical natural Right.

In opposing foundationalism to antifoundationalism, recent political theory betrays its blindness to a third alternative. As suggested by the most influential critics of Kant, the ground of meaning and normativity is neither the human mind—or autonomous constructions of reason—nor historically given forms of life, but the interaction between them, that is, the human openness to the intelligibility granted us by “the things themselves.” This paper articulates that ground in its historical genesis, as it arises in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's defense of a classical conception of reason against modern rationalism, and further developed by Edmund Husserl and the young Leo Strauss. I argue that critics and followers of Strauss have forgotten the phenomenological grounds of his thought in the “fundamental problems” arising from the structure of human experience.

The two papers published here for the first time were written by Leo Strauss (1899–1973) in or around 1945, when he was teaching at the New School for Social Research in New York City. One of Strauss's colleagues at the New School was Kurt Riezler (1882–1955). Riezler had earned a PhD in classics, but had an even more distinguished career as a practical politician; he had been a high-ranking cabinet member in both Imperial and Weimar Germany and a drafter of the Weimar constitution. He had wide-ranging scholarly interests, having written books on the theoretical foundations of politics, art, ancient philosophy, and the fundamental structure of social life. Because they shared an interest in the foundations of social science, he and Strauss co-taught a couple of courses in the mid-1940s (on Aristotle's De anima and Descartes's Passions of the Soul [along with Solomon Asch], and on Plato's Theaetetus [along with Alexandre Koyré]). Strauss indicated the enduring respect he had for Riezler in a eulogy he wrote for him in 1955 and republished as the concluding essay in What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies in 1959.

With a view to elaborating a developmental theory of constitutionalism in the United States, this essay explores the relationship among constitutional, criminal, and civil law. It supports, with relevant case materials, a single proposition: civil litigants are afforded contested constitutional protections in federal court to the extent that the judges attribute an aspect of criminality to the underlying facts or issues in question. The essay tests this proposition in the areas of punitive damages, double jeopardy, and constitutional torts; discusses the mirroring of the stipulated pattern in legal maneuvering on constitutional issues; and briefly spells out its implications for the larger theory.

The fiftieth anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's assassination in November 2013 was commemorated by countless television documentaries recalling the shock and horror of the news from Dealey Plaza. The anniversary also led to the publication of scores of additional books on John F. Kennedy's life and death, to add to the already existing list of over 1,400 titles.