Books by Philip Hamburger

A polemic against the provision of the US tax code that prohibits political speech on the part of nonprofits-and, specifically, in this case, churches-arguing that it is an unconstitutional infringement of speech that has been deliberately used to suppress the views and power of religious activists.

Is Administrative Law Unlawful? The author answers this question in the affirmative, offering a revisionist account of administrative law. Rather than accepting it as a novel power necessitated by modern society, he locates its origins in the medieval and early modern English tradition of royal prerogative.

Hamburger argues that separation of church and state has no historical foundation in the First Amendment and shows that eighteenth-century Americans almost never invoked this principle. Although Jefferson and others retrospectively claimed a First Amendment basis for separation, it became part of American constitutional law only much later.

Hamburger traces the early history of what is today called "judicial review." The book sheds new light on a host of misunderstood problems, including intent, the status of foreign and international law, the cases and controversies requirement, and the authority of judicial precedent.