Timothy Sandefur’s ‘Proclaiming Liberty’

We're now only a month away from the July 4 semiquincentennial of the founding of our country, but there's still time to acquire and read through some of the new books appearing to mark the auspicious occasion.

And one of the very best of the very large field of contenders is from Timothy Sandefur, whose day job is Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute's Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation. His brand new book for the occasion is Proclaiming Liberty: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence.

Tim is one of my favorite writers on legal and constitutional matters, because he combines clear-headedness with clear and lively writing—even in his law review articles, which is no mean feat. His books are even more compelling reading. Proclaiming Liberty builds upon and supplements one of his previous superb books from 2014, The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty. As I tell him in our conversation here, I have long had that book on speed-dial for several specific purposes, and I highly recommend it.

If you paying close attention to the subtitle of the book, you might picked up one detail that suggests the originality of Tim's approach. Most treatments of the Declaration center on Jefferson, but Tim's subtitle puts John Adams first in the order of being, so to speak: it runs 'John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence.' The book is divided into four main sections, and the first one deals with the pre-history of the revolution, or what Tim calls 'The Revolution Before the Revolution,' and traces out the ideas leading up to the Declaration that began to crystalize in the 1760s. Adams is a key figure, but there are many other key figures and concepts that Tim brings out.

The payoff comes at the close of the book, where he ably summarizes how best to understand the Declaration, and adding an Afterword on "1776 versus 1619," reminding us that the egregious 1619 Project, somewhat dormant of late, is likely to re-emerge around July 4 to make the case for hating America. Tim's afterword provides the munitions to fight back.