Thomas G. West is Paul Ermine Potter and Dawn Tibbetts Potter Professor of Politics at Hillsdale College, and Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute. He is the author of Plato's Apology of Socrates: An Interpretation (1979) and Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America (1997). He is co-translator of the best-selling Four Texts on Socrates: Plato's Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito, and Aristophanes' Clouds (1984, rev. ed. 1998). Recent publications include “Freedom of Speech in the Founding and in Modern Liberalism,” “The Transformation of Protestant Theology as a Condition of the American Revolution,” “Progressivism and the Transformation of American Government,” and “The Economic Theory of the American Founding.”

Paul A. Rahe is Professor of History at Hillsdale College, holds the Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage, and is the author of Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (1992), Against Throne and Altar: Machiavelli and Political Theory under the English Republic (2008), Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty: War, Religion, Commerce, Climate, Terrain, Technology, Uneasiness of Mind, the Spirit of Political Vigilance, and the Foundations of the Modern Republic (2009), and Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect (2009). Professor Rahe has been awarded research fellowships by the Center for Hellenic Study, the National Humanities Center, the Institute of Current World Affairs, the Olin Foundation, Washington University's Center for the History of Freedom, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D. C., Clare Hall at Cambridge University, All Souls College at Oxford, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University.

Craig Yirush is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles where he teaches early American history. He received his doctorate in history from Johns Hopkins in 2004, and has held fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library and the Charles Warren Center at Harvard. His research is in early modern political theory, with a particular interest in empire and the problem of indigenous rights. His first book, Settlers, Liberty, and Empire: The Roots of Early American Political Theory, 1675–1775, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011.

C. Bradley Thompson is Professor of Political Science at Clemson University, where he teaches political philosophy, and is also Executive Director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism. He is the author of five books, including Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea (2010) and the award-winning John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty (1998). He is also the editor of Freedom and School Choice in American Education (2011, with Greg Forster), Antislavery Political Writings, 1833–1860: A Reader (2004), and The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams (2000). Currently he is completing a book tentatively entitled The Ideological Origins of American Constitutionalism.

Eric Mack is Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University, where he is also a faculty member of the Murphy Institute of Political Economy. He specializes in social and political philosophy, ethics, and the philosophy of law. He is the editor of Auberon Herbert's The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State and Other Essays (1978) and Herbert Spencer's Man versus the State: With Six Essays on Government, Society, and Freedom (1981), and the author of John Locke (2009). Among his more recent essays are: “Individualism and Libertarian Rights” in Contemporary Debates in Political Philosophy, “What is Left in Left-Libertarianism?” in Hillel Steiner and the Anatomy of Justice, “The Natural Right of Property” in Social Philosophy and Policy, “Nozickan Arguments for the More-Than-Minimal State,” forthcoming in Cambridge Companion to Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and “Friedrich Hayek on the Nature of Social Order and Law,” forthcoming in Twentieth Century Political Philosophy.

James W. Ceaser is Harry F. Byrd Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 1976, and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of several books on American politics and political thought, including Presidential Selection (1979), Liberal Democracy and Political Science (1990), Reconstructing America (1996), Nature and History in American Political Development (2006), and Designing a Polity (2010). He has also coauthored a series on American national elections since 1992. Professor Ceaser currently serves as a presidential appointee to the National Historical Publications and Records Commission and is a frequent contributor to the popular press.

Eldon J. Eisenach is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Tulsa, and taught previously at Penn State University and Cornell University. He is the author of numerous books, including The Lost Promise of Progressivism (1994), The Next Religious Establishment: National Identity and Political Theology in Post-Protestant America (2000), and Narrative Power and Liberal Truth: Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, and Mill (2002), and the editor of Mill and the Moral Character of Liberalism (1999) and The Social and Political Thought of American Progressivism (2006). He serves on editorial boards for History of Political Thought, Studies in American Political Development, and Politics and Religion.

Tiffany Jones Miller is Associate Professor of Politics at the University of Dallas. She is especially interested in the intersection of political philosophy and American political thought and practice. She has published on various aspects of the theory and practice of the American Founding and Progressivism, and is currently writing a book on the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Progressive movement's impact on the domestic policy reforms of the Progressive era, New Deal, and Great Society.

James W. Ely, Jr. is Milton R. Underwood Professor Emeritus of Law, and Professor Emeritus of History at Vanderbilt University. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including The Chief Justiceship of Melville W. Fuller, 1888–1910 (1995); Railroads and American Law (2001); The Bill of Rights in Modern America, rev. ed. (2008) (with David J. Bodenhamer); The Guardian of Every Other Right: A Constitutional History of Property Rights, 3rd ed. (2008); and American Legal History: Cases and Materials, 4^th ed. (2011) (with Kermit L. Hall and Paul Finkelman). He is also a former associate editor of the American Journal of Legal History. Professor Ely has authored a wide range of articles dealing with the rights of property owners in American constitutional history. In 2006, he received the Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Prize. He is presently at work on a book dealing with the history of the contract clause.

Adam Mossoff is Professor of Law at George Mason University School of Law, where he teaches and writes in the areas of intellectual property and property law. His scholarship explores the intersection of intellectual property law and property theory, addressing how natural rights philosophy and the jurisprudential theory known as legal realism affected the creation and subsequent evolution of American patent law. His publications include “Patents as Constitutional Private Property: The Historical Protection of Patents under the Takings Clause,” “What is Property? Putting the Pieces Back Together,” and “Rethinking the Development of Patents: An Intellectual History, 1550–1800.”

Ronald J. Pestritto is Graduate Dean and Associate Professor of Politics at Hillsdale College, where he teaches political philosophy, American political thought, and American politics, and holds the Charles and Lucia Shipley Chair in the American Constitution. He is also Senior Fellow of the College's Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship, Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy and Academic Fellow of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He is the author of American Progressivism (2008), Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (2005), and Founding the Criminal Law: Punishment and Political Thought in the Origins of America (2000). He is the editor of Woodrow Wilson: The Essential Political Writings (2005) and co-editor with Thomas G. West of a three-book series on American political thought (2003, 2004, 2006). Professor Pestritto has also served as a Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University, and has written widely on Progressivism and the administrative state for publications such as the Wall Street Journal and the Claremont Review of Books.

Michael Zuckert is Nancy R. Dreux Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. He has written extensively on the liberal tradition in political philosophy and American constitutionalism. He is the author of several books, including The Natural Rights Republic (1996), Launching Liberalism: John Locke and the Liberal Tradition (2002), and, most recently, Natural Rights and American Constitutionalism (2011).

The editors gratefully acknowledge Liberty Fund, Inc., for holding the conference at which the original versions of these essays were presented and discussed.