In the 1920s, the economy was good, the U.S. had won World War I, and a terrible pandemic ended. But many Americans did not ...

Posner also invokes common sense in defense of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s notorious opinion in Buck v. Bell (1927), upholding a Virginia law authorizing the involuntary sterilization of ...

“In order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence,” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for the majority in 1927’s Buck v. Bell, the state could—and should ...

America’s lost history of eugenics through the eyes of its last remaining survivors ...

Even the constitutional and the morally right don’t always match. In Buck v. Bell (1927), the Supreme Court ruled as constitutional a Virginia eugenics law authorizing forced sterilization of ...