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Philip Hamburger

Philip Hamburger

Chief Executive Officer


Philip Hamburger is a scholar of constitutional law and its history at Columbia Law School. He received his bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and his J.D. from Yale Law School. Before coming to Columbia, he was the John P. Wilson Professor at the University of Chicago Law School. He also taught at George Washington University Law School, Northwestern Law School, University of Virginia Law School, and the University of Connecticut Law School. Professor Hamburger’s contributions are unrivaled by any U.S. legal scholar in driving the national conversations on the First Amendment and the separation of church and state and on administrative power. His work on administrative power has been celebrated by organizations like the Manhattan Institute and the Bradley Foundation, among others.

Supreme Court must rely on the First Amendment, not its own precedent, when deciding government censorship case

By: Philip Hamburger March 27, 2024
The justices of the Supreme Court never focused on the First Amendment’s words when hearing arguments in Murthy v. Missouri last week. The case challenges the federal government’s orchestration of social media censorship, so one might have expected the justices to pay some attention to the First Amendment itself. Instead, the court relied on its own weak doctrines that invited the censorship in the…
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Is There Any Remedy When You’re Censored?

By: Philip Hamburger February 29, 2024
It’s said that for every right there’s a remedy. Three cases before the Supreme Court will test whether that’s true for the freedom of speech. In National Rifle Association v. Vullo, a New York state official took aim at gun advocacy by threatening regulatory hassle for bankers and insurers that continued to do business with the NRA.…
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How to Defeat the Administrative State

By: Philip Hamburger February 22, 2024
Our nation faces many problems, including moral decay, religious decline, economic malaise, and military vulnerabilities, but none of these problems are as firmly entrenched as our primary governmental problem, the administrative state. Administrative power is the executive evasion of legislative and judicial power. The Constitution establishes one mode of making law (in Congress) and one method of…
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