On this episode of the Hayek Program Podcast, Nathan Goodman chats with Anthony Gregory on his latest book, New Deal Law and Order: How the War on Crime Built the Modern Liberal State. Most Americans remember the New Deal as the crucible of modern liberalism. But while it is most closely associated with Roosevelt’s efforts to end the Depression and provide social security for the elderly, we have failed to acknowledge one of its most enduring legacies: its war on crime. The book reassesses the political importance of the 1930s by highlighting the general crisis of lawlessness, arguing that the Roosevelt administration’s criminal justice policies transformed liberalism and the constitutional order. They also helped legitimate government itself, transcending the institutional, jurisdictional, partisan, racial, and social divisions that had previously frustrated national enforcement authority.

Anthony Gregory is a Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University. Anthony is a historian who has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Brown University, and the Rhode Island School of Design, and he is the author of New Deal Law and Order: How the War on Crime Built the Modern Liberal State, The Power of Habeas Corpus in America: From the King’s Prerogative to the War on Terror, and American Surveillance: Intelligence, Privacy, and the Fourth Amendment.

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